“The millennium is at once everywhere and nowhere in our culture…” -from “The Millenia-Old History of the Apocalypse” by Anthony Grafton (1999) According to the author or authors of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus, when asked to describe the signs of the Second Coming, cautioned his disciples against jumping to conclusions. There would be, he…
“They can assume all manner of shapes at their pleasure, appear in what likeness they will themselves…they are most swift in motion, can pass many miles in an instant…” -from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621) Almost four hundred years ago, a young Oxford graduate named Joseph Glanvill published The Vanity of Dogmatizing, a…
“To reveal and discover conspiracies, and to govern the greater things of life; as to blast or succeed the enterprises of princes and people; to tell and foretell the success of such and such undertakings; and even to influence the undertakers…” -from A Compleat System of Magick: or, The History of the Black Art by Daniel Defoe…
“This valorous woman, with sword in hand…commanded troops of soldiers like a captain…” -from Gynevera de le clare donne by Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, eds. C. Ricci and A. Bacchi della Lega (1888). “From her earliest years she hunted wild beasts, and almost like another Diana, she led many companions with her, running through the countryside and…
ODD TRUTHS: THE CAMISARDS, REBEL PROPHETS OF LANGUEDOC “…the sect of the Inspired became so numerous that the valleys swarmed with them, the mountains were covered with them, and the dioceses…were overspread with such a number of prophets, that in the Cevennes and the lower Languedoc only, they were computed at eight thousand souls.” -from…