A richly illustrated tapestry of interwoven studies spanning some six thousand years of history, Dæmons Are Forever is at once a record of archaic contacts and transactions between humans and protean spirit beings—dæmons—and an account of exchanges, among human populations, of the science of spirit beings: dæmonology. Since the time of the Indo-European migrations, and especially following the opening of the Silk Road, a common dæmonological vernacular has been shared among populations ranging from East and South Asia to Northern Europe. In this virtuoso work of historical sleuthing, David Gordon White recovers the trajectories of both the “inner demons” cohabiting the bodies of their human hosts and the “outer dæmons” that those same humans recognized each time they encountered them in their enchanted haunts: sylvan pools, sites of geothermal eruptions, and dark forest groves. Along the way, he invites his readers to reconsider the potential and promise of the historical method in religious studies, suggesting that a “connected histories” approach to Eurasian dæmonology may serve as a model for restoring history to its proper place at the heart of the discipline of the history of religions.

New York Times bestselling author Simon R. Green continues his Secret Histories fantasy adventure series featuring supernatural super agent Eddie Drood. The name’s Drood. Shaman Drood. For centuries, my seriously dysfunctional family have been battling the forces of evil, all the while keeping you everyday folks safe, sound, and blissfully unaware of just how truly nasty this world can be. And due to some recent internal conflicts, I’m the man in charge of the whole mess. So, of course, things are about to go sideways. It turns out that in the darkest days of World War II, my family was in a hard place, fighting a desperate battle against some infernal creatures the Nazis had brought into the fray. So, the Droods decided to fight fiend with fiend, making a very stupid deal with a bunch of demons called the Loathly Ones to take our side. The good news is they did a hell of a job. The bad news is they decided to stick around. Now, they’re calling home to let their even more nightmarish masters know that this world is ripe for conquest. And me and mine are the only ones who can stop them.

In the sequel to The Man with the Golden Torc, Eddie Drood is forced to take on some nasty daemons from another dimension, who arrived in this world at the behest of the Drood family to help battle the Nazis during World War II and who have decided that they have no intention of leaving.

New York Times bestselling author Simon Green introduces a new kind of hero, one who fights the good fight against some very old foes in the first novel in the Secret Histories series. The name’s Bond. Shaman Bond. Actually, that's just his cover. His real name is Eddie Drood, but when your job includes a license to kick supernatural arse on a regular basis, you find your laughs where you can. For centuries, his family has been the secret guardian of Humanity, all that stands between all of you and all of the really nasty things that go bump in the night. As a Drood field agent he wore the golden torc, he killed monsters, and he protected the world. He loved his job. Right up to the point where his own family declared him rogue for no reason. Now, the only people who can help Eddie prove his innocence are the people he used to consider his enemies...

This first volume in a collection devoted to the subject of the "daimon/daemon" provides a comprehensive and detailed description of the intermediary spirits in the Western Tradition. Being a fundamental part of Magic, these spirits have important ramifications on the religions and philosophies from Late Antiquity through the present. Tracking the origins and developments of the concept of intermediary spirits under the terms "daimon/daemon," from Homer to Augustine and beyond, reveals a very rich fountain of knowledge with direct importance to the comprehension of the worldview shared by magical practitioners from every age and culture. DAEMONOLOGY: AN INTRODUCTION WITH A SELECTION OF TEXTS addresses the diverse uses of the concept of the intermediary spirit in the history and practice of Magic, and its correlates in other cultures."

The #1 New York Times Bestseller! Return to the world of His Dark Materials—now an HBO original series starring Dafne Keen, Ruth Wilson, Andrew Scott, and Lin-Manuel Miranda—in the second volume of Philip Pullman’s new bestselling masterwork The Book of Dust. The windows between the many worlds have been sealed and the momentous adventures of Lyra Silvertongue’s youth are long behind her—or so she thought. Lyra is now a twenty-year-old undergraduate at St. Sophia’s College and intrigue is swirling around her once more. Her daemon Pantalaimon is witness to a brutal murder, and the dying man entrusts them with secrets that carry echoes from their past. The more Lyra is drawn into these mysteries, the less she is sure of. Even the events of her own past come into question when she learns of Malcolm Polstead’s role in bringing her to Jordan College. Now Lyra and Malcolm will travel far beyond the confines of Oxford, across Europe and into the Levant, searching for a city haunted by daemons, and a desert said to hold the truth of Dust. The dangers they face will challenge everything they thought they knew about the world, and about themselves. Praise for The Book of Dust “It’s a stunning achievement, this universe Pullman has created and continues to build on.” —The New York Times “Pullman’s writing is simple, unpretentious, beautiful, true. The conclusion to The Book of Dust can’t come soon enough.”—The Washington Post

"An impressive and important cross-cultural study that has vast implications for history, religion, anthropology, folklore, and other fields. . . . Remarkably wide-ranging and extremely well-documented, it covers (among much else) the following: medieval Christian legends such as the 14th-century Ethiopian Gadla Hawaryat (Contendings of the Apostles) that had their roots in Parthian Gnosticism and Manichaeism; dog-stars (especially Sirius), dog-days, and canine psychopomps in the ancient and Hellenistic world; the cynocephalic hordes of the ancient geographers; the legend of Prester John; Visvamitra and the Svapacas ("Dog-Cookers"); the Dog Rong ("warlike barbarians") during the Xia, Shang, and Zhou periods; the nochoy ghajar (Mongolian for "Dog Country") of the Khitans; the Panju myth of the Southern Man and Yao "barbarians" from chapter 116 of the History of the Latter Han and variants in a series of later texts; and the importance of dogs in ancient Chinese burial rites. . . . Extremely well-researched and highly significant."—Victor H. Mair, Asian Folklore Studies