Letters on demonology and witchcraft pdf

Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, Free ebook | Global Grey

This is a series of essays by Walter Scott on the subject of the witch-craze, demonology, and other occult topics. Scott has an antiquarian mind, and obviously relishes exposing the reader to the grotesque and the unusual. You have asked of me, my dear friend, that I should assist the "Family Library" with the history of a dark chapter in human nature, which the increasing civilization of all well-instructed countries has now almost blotted out, though the subject attracted no ordinary degree of consideration in the older times of their history. Among much reading of my earlier days, it is no doubt true that I travelled a good deal in the twilight regions of superstitious disquisitions. Many hours have I lost -- "I would their debt were less! And, of late years, the very curious extracts published by Mr. Pitcairn, from the Criminal Records of Scotland, are, besides their historical value, of a nature so much calculated to illustrate the credulity of our ancestors on such subjects, that, by perusing them, I have been induced more recently to recall what I had read and thought upon the subject at a former period.