All is not well in the kingdom of Rhyngill. Despite regular payment of tithes, including PAYE (Pay As You Eat), the citizens are all tired and underfed. Firkin, a lad who is definitely alpha plus in the get-up-and-go department, blames the king, and sets out to find an assassin who will rid the kingdom of its ruler. But little does he know that the real villain is someone else entirely - or that the origins of his friends' troubles involve lemmings, pigeons and heavy earth-moving equipment. It takes a pieman, a magician and a knight with a North Country accent to help Firkin see the error of his ways!

When Gretel—yes, that Gretel, now all grown up and working as a private investigator—takes on the case of a missing sorcerer, she doesn't realize that it will take her into the heart of the deep, dark woods, and face to face with an old enemy . . . Gretel has never had any time for sorcerers, considering them nothing more than show-offs with questionable fashion sense. It is with some reluctance and a deal of grumpiness, then, that she agrees to look into the matter of a murdered magician. All that is left of him is a grisly remnant, which the police quack confirms is the murdered man’s appendix. What has become of the rest of him is baffling the local constabulary, the Sorcerers’ Society, and, not least, the hapless trickster’s widow. As Gretel delves into the facts behind his disappearance, she discovers no shortage of suspects. In fact, just about everyone she meets had reason for wanting the odious man dead. Her only clue points in one disturbing direction: the deep dark forest. So it is that Gretel, with a reluctant Hans as porter, must trek into the woods of her childhood trauma, braving all manner of discomforts and dangers— not least of which is a terrifying reminder of her past.

When Gretel—yes, that Gretel, now all grown up and working as a private investigator—takes on the case of a missing sorcerer, she doesn't realize that it will take her into the heart of the deep, dark woods, and face to face with an old enemy . . . Gretel has never had any time for sorcerers, considering them nothing more than show-offs with questionable fashion sense. It is with some reluctance and a deal of grumpiness, then, that she agrees to look into the matter of a murdered magician. All that is left of him is a grisly remnant, which the police quack confirms is the murdered man’s appendix. What has become of the rest of him is baffling the local constabulary, the Sorcerers’ Society, and, not least, the hapless trickster’s widow. As Gretel delves into the facts behind his disappearance she discovers no shortage of suspects. In fact, just about everyone she meets had reason for wanting the odious man dead. Her only clue points in one disturbing direction: the deep dark forest. So it is that Gretel, with a reluctant Hans as porter, must trek into the woods of her childhood trauma, braving all manner of discomforts and dangers—not least of which is a terrifying reminder of her past.

This book is mainly an English translation of Jón Magnússon's A Story of Sufferings. Magnússon, a seventeenth-century Lutheran priest in Iceland, endured intense physical and mental sufferings, which he attributed to the black magic of three alleged sorcerers. The two male sorcerers were tried, convicted, and burned to death, but the third (a woman) was acquitted. The work may have been written as material for appealing the acquittal of the woman to a higher court. This book also includes a historical introduction, a chronology of Jón Magnússon's life, and the rulings from the trials. Though hardly pleasant to read, A Story of Sufferings is a literary masterpiece in the original. It should be of interest to students of mystical religion and to historians of the witchcraft craze that plagued Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Come join our three friends, Timothy, Jason and Annie along with their pet bird on an amazing adventure. One rainy day the three children find an old box in the basement, but little do they know that by opening the box and stepping playfully into it they will soon find themselves in a world filled with wonder, fun and excitement. This book is unique, as it pulls the readers into the story and gives them a chance to interact and to identify themselves with the heroes. It almost seems as if the reader is standing next to the three children and experiences their wishes, laughter, fears and friendship. Meet their new friends and enemies, like the black sorcerer in Gigantica, take part in their adventures and use your imagination when you help them to complete their tasks. Make a looking glass, use magic ink, build Candyland, etc. It is an ADVENTURE Story It is a CRAFTS book It is a GAMES book It is a COOK book This story will test the courage and friendship of our three friends.-Will you help them? What are you waiting for? OPEN THE BOX AND LET THE ADVENTURE BEGIN.

This extraordinary book, written from material gathered over half a century ago, will almost certainly be the last fine-grained account of traditional Aboriginal life in settled south-eastern Australia. It recreates the world of the Yaraldi group of the Kukabrak or Narrinyeri people of the Lower Murray and Lakes region of South Australia. In 1939 Albert Karloan, a Yaraldi man, urged a young ethnologist, Ronald Berndt, to set up camp at Murray Bridge and to record the story of his people. Karloan and Pinkie Mack, a Yaraldi woman, possessed through personal experience, not merely through hearsay, an all but complete knowledge of traditional life. They were virtually the last custodians of that knowledge and they felt the burden of their unique situation. This book represents their concerted efforts to pass on the story to future generations. For Ronald and Catherine Berndt, this was their first fieldwork together in an illustrious joint career of almost fifty years. During long periods, principally until 1943, they laboured with pencil and paper to put it all down - a far cry from the recording techniques of today's oral historians. Their fieldnotes were worked into a rough draft of what would become, but not until recently, the finished manuscript. The book's range is encyclopaedic and engrossing - sometimes dramatic. It encompasses relations between and among individuals and clan groups, land tenure, kinship, the subsistence economy, trade, ceremony, councils, fighting and warfare, rites of passage from conception to death, myths, and beliefs and practices concerning healing and the supernatural. Not least, it is a record of the dramatic changes following European colonization. A World That Was is a unique contribution to Australia's cultural history. There is simply no comparable body of work, nor is there ever likely to be.

Bewitchment, whether voluntary or involuntary, physical or moral is a homicide — and the more infamous because it eludes self-defence by the victim and punishment by law. Moral maladies are far more contagious than physical. Some triumphs of infatuation are comparable to leprosy or cholera. Bewitchment by means of currents is exceedingly common, morally as well as physically; most of us are carried away by the crowd. Absolute hatred, unleavened by rejected passion or personal cupidity, is a death sentence for its object. Black magic is a graduated combination of sacrileges and murders designed for the perversion of the human will. It is the religion of the devil, the cultus of darkness, and the hatred of good carried to the height of paroxysm. Not only do the wicked torment the good, but the good torture the wicked unconsciously. We may die through love as well as through hate, for there are absorbing passions under the breath of which we feel depleted like the spouses of vampires. Antipathy is the presentiment of a possible bewitchment, either of love or hatred, for we find love frequently succeeding repulsion. Instantaneous sympathies and electric infatuations are explosions of the astral light, which is akin to the discharge of strong magnetic batteries. Bewitchment by a will persistently confirmed in ill-doing, cannot be pulled back without risk of death. The spell may be staved off by substitution or deflection of the astral current. But the sorcerer who releases a spell must have another object for his malevolence, or he himself will perish by his own spell because every poisoned magnetic emission that cannot reach its target will return with force to its point of departure. Virtue is one of the elixirs of long life and well-being. While vice is hid by hypocrisy, virtue is suspected to be hypocrisy. Sorcery, whether by spells or love-potions, is venomous magic. We write not to instruct but to warn. Sorcerers are often poor country folks, repulsed by all, and therefore afflicted by enduring bitterness. The fear which they inspired was their consolation and their revenge. Magical emblems and characters, engraved on amulets and talismans, are relics of old religious rites, the meaning of which is no longer understood. Only harmlessness and brotherhood in thought and deed, coupled with non-resistance to evil, can shield us from evil. Real protection comes from personal merit and virtue, not from talismans. Nought is permitted to the virtuous man. Love, above all in a woman, is a veritable hallucination; for want of a prudent motive, it will frequently select an absurd one. Cyanide, when not lethal, will enfeeble the mind already poisoned by an evil will. Stay clear of bitter almonds (as well as the kernels of apricot, peach, and cherry), almond flavour extracts such as Amaretto, almond milk, soaps, and perfumes, Datura stramonium, and other hallucinogens. Tobacco, by smoking or otherwise, is a dangerous and stupefying philtre and brain poison. Nicotine is not less deadly than cyanide. Moreover, the latter is present in tobacco in larger quantities than in bitter almonds. But the most terrific of all philtres is the exaltation of misdirected devotion. By fuelling the imagination, excessive fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Goodness is much stronger than evil. Rise then above childish fears and dumb desires. Stamp out evil influence by controlling unbridled imagination and fanciful speculation. Believe in supreme wisdom for true wisdom cannot ensnare your intelligence. Poisons can may make you ill but never immoral. Weakness sympathises with vice because vice itself is a weakness that assumes the mask of strength. Madness holds reason in horror, and delights in the exaggerations of falsehood. Every human being, whether magus or not, should oppose violence by mildness, chastise evil by good, cruelty by tenderness. There can be nothing more dangerous than to make magic a pastime, or part of an evening’s entertainment. Magnetic experiments, performed under such conditions, can only exhaust the subjects, mislead opinions, and defeat science. The milder and calmer you are, the more effective will be your anger; the more energetic you are, the more precious will be your forbearance; the more skilful you are, the better will you profit by your intelligence and even by your virtues; the more indifferent you are, the more easily will you make yourself loved. Excessive love produces antipathy; blind hate counteracts and scourges itself; vanity leads to abasement and the most cruel humiliations. Remember that the magus is sovereign, and a sovereign never avenges because he has the right to punish; in the exercise of this right he performs his duty, and is implacable as justice. The way to see clearly is not to be always looking; and he who spends his whole life upon a single object will not attain it. Ceremonies are methods to create a habit of will, however, redundant when the habit is firmly established. We will now expose and stigmatise some of the most abhorrent acts. What sorcerers seek above all, in their evocations of the impure spirit, is that magnetic power which is the possession of the true adept, so that they can shamefully abuse it. Providence seems to scorn those who despise the martyrs, and to slay those who would deprive them of life. The terrible menace of hell inflicted by Christianity upon its flock has created more nightmares, more nameless diseases, more furious madness, than all vices and excesses combined. That is what the Hermetic artists of the middle ages represented by the incredible and unheard-of monsters, which they carved at the doors of basilicas. Moral equilibrium rests upon the immutable distinction between true and false, good and bad; one must place himself, by his works, in the empire of truth and goodness or relapse eternally, like the rock of Sisyphus, into a pandemonium of falsehood and evil. Wash carefully your clothes before giving them away. In times of epidemic the terror-struck are the first to be attacked. The secret of not fearing evil is to ignore it altogether. The wise men have scarcely any sorceries to fear, save those of fortune, but when called upon to advise they must persuade the bewitched to do some act of goodness to his bewitcher, to render him some service which he cannot refuse, and lead him to the communion of salt. The chemist imitates nature, the alchemist surpasses nature herself. Chemistry decomposes and recombines material substances, it purifies simple substances of foreign elements, but leaves the primitive elements unchanged. Alchemy changes the character of things, and raises them up into higher states of existence. As all the powers of the universe are potentially contained in us, our body and its organs are the representatives of the powers of nature and a constellation of the same powers that formed the stars in the sky.

A Role-Playing Game of Swords, Sorcery, and Weird Fantasy

"Ward and Weiden have produced that rare book that is both a meticulous piece of scholarship and a good read. The authors have . . . sifted through a varied and voluminous amount of archival material, winnowing out the chaff and leaving the excellent wheat for our consumption. They marry this extensive archival research with original survey data, using both to great effect." --Law and Politics Book Review"Helps illuminate the inner workings of an institution that is still largely shrouded in mystery." --The Wall Street Journal Online"The main quibble . . . with contemporary law clerks is that they wield too much influence over their justices' opinion-writing. Artemus and Weiden broaden this concern to the clerks' influence on the thinking of the justices about how to decide cases." --Slate.comProvides excellent insight into the inner workings of the Supreme Court, how it selects cases for review, what pressures are brought to bear on the justices, and how the final opinions are produced. Recommended for all academic libraries. --Library JournalArtemus Ward and David L. Weiden argue that the clerks have more power than they used to have, and probably more power than they should. --Washington PostThe book contains a wealth of historical information. . . . A reader can learn a lot from this pioneering study. --Cleveland Plain DealerMeticulous in scholarship. . . . Sorcerers' Apprentices presents convincing statistical evidence that the aggregate time that law clerks spend on certiorari memos has fallen considerably because of the reduction in the number of memos written by each clerk. --Judge Richard A. Posner in The New RepublicBased on judicial working papers and extensive interviews, the authors have compiled the most complete picture to dat