Cistercian Legends of the 13th Century: Now Available!

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The Cistercian order is one of great importance within the history of Catholicism. Their focus on hard work tended to uplift adjacent communities more than similarly constructed groups. The Cistercians, it seems, also had a very early hearty sense of humor (by the standards of the 13th century!) for some of their legends and tales involve tricking Satan, upstanding bishops and priests, and generally demonstrate their ascetic piety and charity.

This book relates a large number of tales, ranging from the humorous to the serious, and from the believable to the outright bizarre.

174 pages.

Mysticism; its Nature and Value: Now Available!

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This fine work is a lengthy explanation of the concept of Christian mysticism, addressing "rea" incidents and concepts of mystic value (according to the authors' perspective!) as opposed to those which are more derived from rational thought or mental analysis. It speaks highly of Proclus while denouncing Dionysus the Aeropagite, among other things.

155 pages.

The Stigmata: Now Available!

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This fine little work is a compilation of tales of the Stigmata as reported over the course of centuries by the Catholic church. The phenomenon itself is the appearance of marks on the body commensurate with the wounds imparted on Jesus during crucifixion. Regardless of whether you believe in such a phenomenon, it's a very valuable bit of history pertinent to the Catholic church and some of the stories are quite supernatural (such as levitation and religiously significant marks on the heart upon dissection.)

130 pages.

Essays in Occultism: Now Available!

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This work is quite nice, and was written from a dedicated Catholic perspective- indeed, the slow march of time has seen some of these feasibly canonical ideas cast aside by the Vatican even as they are retained by lay Catholics in large part- such as a belief that seances and ouija boards can actually cause demonic influence. These days the church itself tends to render those to the realm of quasi-sinful but not paranormally dangerous.

It provides numerous examples of mystical phenomena like bilocation and bicorporeality as well, and gives many short stories and tales to illustrate its claims. In one very interesting passage we see a story about a priest who became cataleptic only for his apparition to be seen attending the then-dying pope.

107 pages.

Diabology: Now Available!

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Diabology is a rather extensive work of demonology, although that is not the only subject. Indeed, it concerns itself with everything dark within the Christian spiritual framework and, naturally, thus the contrasting opposites of those same things and ideas; for the demon there is an angel, for Satan a God, and so forth. Altogether the work is quite dense as well, and it is much more an academic guide than a casual work. It is most interesting, perhaps, for its treatment of the very nature of good and evil based on the Bible, and elaborates at quite a lot of length on how this informs the Christian view of demons, including from a linguistic point of view.

It should be noted that some footnotes were omitted because they merely replicated quotations in the main work itself in German or Greek. I retained the Latin because it is interesting.

171 pages.

The Roman Index of Forbidden Books: Now Available!

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It should be said in the interest of full disclosure that this is definitely a Catholic-made and pro-Catholic treatment of the churches' old style tendency to forbid (and later merely reprove) literary works on a theological, ethical, and political basis. However, that does not render it uninteresting; the index here alone for its era of manufacture (of a large number of works the index listed at the time) is fairly good fodder for those who want to obtain material the papacy found objectionable; notably Darwin's work and a great deal of philosophical material. Oddly, this very work refutes the idea that the index provides any help to those seeking to read "anti-catholic" materials.

It goes through the elaborate process used to determine whether works shall or shall not be forbidden, and the spiritual implications of authors who accept or refuse the judgment, as well as listing the reading of such material as a potential mortal sin, as long as enough of it is absorbed.

55 pages.

Demoniality; Incubi and Succubi: Now Available!

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Now comes the first of at least three works on demonology which I intend to edit and release in the wake of King James' own Demonology; this time, a Catholic rather than Protestant work, which appears to be a rough counterpart to (and at several points a refutation of) the Protestant Demonological tradition.

The text covers, in quite a bit of detail, the nature of incubi and succubi in an elemental and physical sense, their relative status as beings, relates several specific tales of their amorous passion or their violent nature, then proceeds to speak of literal demonic necrophilia in which a corpse has been requisitioned by an incubus for nocturnal purposes; unlike King James' work, which refutes the concept that such unions produced children, Sinistrari believes that they can, and that often the resultant offspring were essentially lesser Nephilim, spawned (as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and others supposedly were) not by mortal man but by "gods" which Sinistrari considers a reference to the demonic. Helpfully, the original author clears up an apparent confusion over whether sex with corpses possessed by demons is a form of bestiality; he claims that it is merely an act of spiritual pollution punishable only by urging repentance- a rather tolerant stance for the era.

In the strangest twist of all, he then claims that demonic entities, at least those of certain types, are actually capable of being killed physically by humans, and of also repenting of their sins and gaining entry to paradise.

Originally a Renaissance work in Latin, Father Sinistrari's Demoniality was translated into English in the 1870s by Isidore Liseux. Liseux' version retained the Latin and contained several lengthy advertisement pages as well as a post-preface ramble on the work which did very little to illuminate it (all of this material I have omitted as useless.)

90 pages.