Trafficking with Demons explores how magic was perceived, practiced, and prohibited in western Europe during the first millennium CE. Through the overlapping frameworks of religion, ritual, and gender, Martha Rampton connects early Christian reckonings with pagan magic to later doctrines and dogmas. Challenging established views on the role of women in ritual magic during this period, Rampton provides a new narrative of the ways in which magic was embedded within the foundational assumptions of western European society, informing how people understood the cosmos, divinity, and their own Christian faith. As Rampton shows, throughout the first Christian millennium, magic was thought to play a natural role within the functioning of the universe and existed within a rational cosmos hierarchically arranged according to a "great chain of being." Trafficking with the "demons of the lower air" was the essense of magic. Interactions with those demons occurred both in highly formalistic, ritual settings and on a routine and casual basis. Rampton tracks the competition between pagan magic and Christian belief from the first century CE, when it was fiercest, through the early Middle Ages, as atavistic forms of magic mutated and found sanctuary in the daily habits of the converted peoples and new paganisms entered Europe with their own forms of magic. By the year 1000, she concludes, many forms of magic had been tamed and were, by the reckoning of the elite, essentially ineffective, as were the women who practiced it and the rituals that attended it.

Illegal, inhuman, and impervious to recession, there is one trade that continues to thrive, just out of sight. The international sex trade criss-crosses the entire globe, a sinister network made up of criminal masterminds, local handlers, corrupt policemen, willfully blind politicians, eager consumers, and countless hapless women and children. In this ground-breaking work of investigative reporting, the celebrated journalist Lydia Cacho follows the trail of the traffickers and their victims from Mexico to Turkey, Thailand to Iraq, Georgia to the UK, to expose the trade's hidden links with the tourist industry, internet pornography, drugs and arms smuggling, the selling of body organs, money laundering, and even terrorism. This is an underground economy in which a sex slave can be bought for the price of a gun, but Cacho's powerful first-person interviews with mafiosi, pimps, prostitutes, and those who managed to escape from captivity makes it impossible to ignore the terrible human cost of this lucrative exchange. Shocking and sobering, Slavery Inc, is an exceptional book, both for the colossal scope of its enquiry, and for the tenacious bravery with which Cacho pursues the truth.

Here is an illuminating study of the devil from a veteran seminary professor and author. "This work uses the light of Scripture to expose the person and methods of Satan . . . Competent books on this subject are not plentiful. . . . Pentecost gives us a very useful survey of information on Satan."--"Christianity Today."

For months, socially withdrawn Dr. Brent Carson has been reading about women being abducted throughout the city, the most recent article revealing how all of them may have been practitioners of witchcraft. Out of curiosity, Brent decides to personally investigate what is going on, but is distracted when four friends move to the city, all of whom he knows to be werewolves - except for Angela Dane, who is only half. Angela is an energetic, talented and very spirited girl. She is extremely close and loyal to her friends, but the first moment Brent sees Angela, there is something about her he finds disturbing. He cannot understand why, but his first reaction towards her is one of hatred, inexplicably feeling as if she shouldn't even be alive. That night, Angela is attacked by a psychotic demon, one who has been stealing paranormal beings for centuries and taking them to hell for his personal version of trafficking. The demon almost claims her as his newest prize, only to have his interests quickly switch to Brent the moment he learns of his true identity.

In 2005, after publishing her book The Demons of Eden—where she denounced the very powerful men behind the a Mexican child pornography ring—Lydia Cacho became a target. Exactly eight months after the publication of the book, one morning as she was making her way to work, Lydia was apprehended by the police from the neighboring state of Puebla, and taken into custody during a nightmarish 24 hours during which she was tortured, intimidated and abused. In this chilling memoir, comparable to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel, Lydia tells her story and exposes the horrific ways in which women—and young girls in particular—are abused then disposed of, while an oftentimes corrupt government simply sits and watches.

Three thousand years of encounters with malevolent beings that have invaded our waking lives and our nightmares A Penguin Classic For millennia, societies have told tales of their fears incarnate—otherworldly couriers of plague, death, temptation, and moral decline. The Penguin Book of Demons summons these supernatural creatures—and the humans who have hunted and been haunted by them—across cultures and continents: the daemons of ancient Greece and Rome; the giant, biblical half humans known as Nephilim who stalked the earth before the Great Flood; corrupted angels, condemned to eternity in Hell; the jinn of Islamic Arabia; the female, child-eating Gelloudes of Byzantium; the seductive incubi and succubi of northern Europe; the animal spirits of early modern China; and the cannibalistic Wendigo of Native American folklore. From demonic possession to black magic, these accounts give life to a spellbinding, skin-crawling history of the paranormal. For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Devil was a commanding figure in Tudor and Stuart England. He played a leading role in the religious and political conflicts of the age, and inspired great works of poetry and drama. During the turmoil of the English Civil War, fears of a secret conspiracy of Devil-worshippers fuelled a witch-hunt that claimed at least a hundred lives. This book traces the idea of the Devel from the English Reformation to the scientific revolution of the late seventeenth century. It shows that he was not only a central figure in the imaginative life of the age, but also a deeply ambiguous and complex one: the avowed enemy of God and his unwilling accomplice, and a creature that provoked fascination, comdey and dread.