![]() ![]() ![]() My Dictionary of Witchcraft has a blue rectangle… ![]() In every image that I have found online, the Dictionary of Witchcraft has a purple rectangle and the Dictionary of Demonology has a blue rectangle. To add insult to my frustration, I noticed that the covers of the two books differ slightly. I know I’ve written a lot about this frustrating inconvenience, but I couldn’t find any discussion on this topic and I’d love to hear from anyone who could clear up this confusion. Also, it’s difficult to compare the entries in this piece of crap with the French text online. I can’t be entirely sure if the books are a pair the other book costs far more than this one, and I’m not willing to risk another expensive disappointment. Baskin’s shitty editing makes it all the more irritating. That would be acceptable if it was actually alluded to somewhere in this book. Perhaps Baskin was trying to recreate the ‘two volume’ feel of the 1818 edition of the book and purposely split the entries into the categories of witchcraft and demonology. In 1965 the Philosophical Library publishing company released this book and a different book titled ‘Dictionary of Demonology’. The slightly embarrassing entry on the book’s own author mentions, ‘this dictionary, of which the first edition appeared in two volumes in 1818’ (1818 being the year Dictionnaire Infernal was published!), and also specifically references the book as the ‘second edition of the Dictionary of Demonology’. It actually refers to itself as ‘ The Dictionary of Demonology’ in Wade Baskin’s introduction, and then on the very next page it uses the title ‘The Dictionary of Witchcraft’. Now I’m not one to get upset when a book isn’t convincing, but this book isn’t merely unconvincing it’s deceiving. His name was Tanchelm, his heresies weren’t particularly wicked and he was dead by 1115.) This is certainly a valuable nugget of information, but there’s no mention of Tanchelin’s witchy heresies! (I googled him. Fathers begged him to sleep with their daughters and wives. The money that came to him…enabled him to have good food and superb service. In 1125 a heretic named Tanchelin was revered to such a degree in some provinces that people drank his urine and preserved his excrement as a relic. Some of the entries are vaguely entertaining, but none of them are particularly believable. Instead of a straight forward translation of the Dictionnaire Infernal, this book is largely an alphabetized list of French witches. Based on the title, I naively presumed that this book would be a translation of Dictionnaire Infernal by De Plancy. I bought my copy online and never had the chance to look through the book before buying it. ![]()
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