A very thorough, well-written examination of how Satan and evil have been
viewed since the Reformation. Russell takes a historian's stance to examine
a subject both controversial and mystifying at best. No stone is left unturned
as he looks at how the devil is viewed by church officials, commonfolk,
and intelligentsia,and how these views are reflected in the artwork and pop-culture
of those times. This work manages at once to be intellectual and an easy read,
thorough and engrossing. A must for anyone fascinated by the forces that have shaped Christian thought.

I really appreciated reading this book, which is the work of a serious religious scholar. I am a very Wicca-friendly, Pagan-wise person (in my opinion), and certainly do not believe the heart or soul of a religion can be judged better by scholars than by practitioners. But I also think critically, love history and respect fact. This book settled a lot of questions that books written by either firm believers or ranting detractors failed to.

This is a fair book, well-researched. It lays the groundwork for 3 kinds of "witchery" in human history: "sorcery," which has belonged to and persists in all cultures, all religions, at all times, in various forms, with various levels of acceptance; "diabolical witchcraft," which is an "invention of the [European] Middle Ages," a compendium of folklore + religious bigotry + political expediency + etc....; and "modern witchcraft," which is a "new religion." And he, thankfully, makes it clear that Wicca and Paganism are not in any way satanic: "Satanism today is quite different from historical witchcraft, however, and it is totally rejected by all the neopagan witches today. Modern witches observe that since they reject Christianity they can scarecely be supposed to worship a Christian Devil. I describe Satansim here only so that the lack of resemblance between it and witchcraft may be clear."

While Russell's book deals mostly with religious and historical analysis and his critique of the claims of early 20th-century folklorists (such as Margaret Murray, whose "The Witch-cult of Western Europe" and "God of the Witches" have now been -- whether some folks like it or not -- proven largely, though not entirely, ill-grounded in their conclusions), he gives due credit to the living belief systems of modern day Pagans and Wiccans.

While he reveals the sometimes sordid esotericism of the Crowley-Gardener heritage of modern Wicca, he does not use old rumors and scandals (even Crowley's well-known dabbling with diabolism) to tarnish contemporary witches or their religion. As he says, "That Gardener (or Crowley) invented the religion does not invalidate it. Every religion has a founder, and much that surrounds the origin of every religion is historically suspect. Lack of historicity does not necessarily deprive a religion of its insight."

As Russell concludes his book, after two chapters that respectfully (sometimes it seemed even 'lovingly') set out the practices of Wicca in 20th-C, "One need not be a witch -- I am not -- to understand witchcraft as a valid expression of the religious experience. The religion of withcraft offers to restore a lost option, paganism, to our religious world view. Both Christianity and scientism have taught us falsely that paganism is nonsense... This is not an informed view... The neopagan witches are attempting to recreate the positive values of pagan religion."

Jeffery Burton Russell is well known for his works on the history and myth of the Devil. Here Russell provides us with a very well-researched introduction to historical witchcraft that seeks to give an overview of the essential influences and origins of witchcraft and the Christian myths of diabolic magic and demonic pacts that eventually lead to the virulent witch-craze of the Renaissance and early modern period.

Russell identifies several essential elements that influenced European thought and lead to the persecution and murder of tens of thousands of suspected "witches". These are: sorcery, ancient pagan religious beliefs, Christian theology, Inqusitorial and other anti-witch writings. These elements provided the basis for a belief in diabolic witchcraft that, modern historians largely argue, never existed and erupted in the period between 1450-1750 in the largest witch hysteria in history. However, Russell shows that these types of events are not relegated to the past, but can occurr in any society at any time, such as Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia in recent times. Russell analyzes the witch hunts in Europe, England, and the American Colonies and contrasts the various judicial methods and popular beliefs regarding them. For instance, it is interesting to note that unlike on the Continent, England viewed the crime of witchcraft as a civil rather than religious matter. This has alot to do with the connection between witchcraft and chrisitan heresy that was prevalent in Europe in the centuries prior to the beginning of the witch hunts but that was largely absent from English history. Russell continues with an analyses of the decline of the witch-craze and the rise of general skepticism and disbelief in witchery. He shows that by the late 18th century, the accusation and execution of suspected witches had all but ceased. It was only in the late 19th century that a revived nterest in magic and the occult gave rise to a romanticized interst in witchcraft. Russell concludes with an overview of the history of modern-day witchcraft and neo-paganism and the lingering perceptions that the public maintains about it.

This is an excellent introduction to the academic history of witchcraft and should lead interested readers to a more in-depth study regarding one of the most horrific periods in human history.

I was highly impressed with this book. The author deals not only with the history of Witchcraft, but sheds light on how many of the common ideas and misconceptions concerning Witchcraft came into being. What he gives is a fairly broad overview of European and American Witchcraft's overall developement and proper place in history. He leads up to, and deals briefly with modern Pagan Witchcraft, but focuses primarily on earlier developement prior to the 20th century. Read this for the broad view, and Ronald Hutton's _Triumph of the Moon_ for a more narrowly focused view, and you'll have pretty well all the common misconceptions and misinformation still prevailant within the Witchcraft community today cleared away. Money well spent.

I just finished reading this book. Overall, I recommend it, although I think the author makes a much better historian than philosopher. Fortunately, he spends most of the book being a historian. The book covers the beginnings of a Devil concept in Zoroastrianism up to modern beliefs about the Devil. Naturally, there are surveys of Milton, Dante, and Faustian motifs. The author admits that his book is Christian-centric, which I can accept for the historical parts of the book. But I think he took a wrong turn in the last few, more philosophical, chapters where he dismisses modern materialism and skepticism of the existence of Satan.

Jeffrey B. Russell's "Prince of Darkness" is an excellent introduction to the complex history and mythology surrounding one of the most famous entities to grace the stage of religion and history, a being known by many names: Beelzebub, the Archfiend, Old Scratch, Lucifer, and Satan. It serves essentially as an overview of his series of four books on the Devil at each stage of history from ancient to modern times.

Russell traces the Satan myth from its earliest primitive conceptual origins in Summerian and Babylonian myth and its influence on ancient Judaism and Zoroastrianism. He shows that there are really only four religions throughout all of history that have had a concept of a singular entity that is the total personification of pure and radical evil, these being anicent Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam. Each has its own rich and complex history and diabology, but it has been Christianity that has had the most complex and influential.

The book then continues with an analysis of the miriad of influences within Christianity on the evolving concept, role, and image of the Devil, from the early Christian tradtions as developed by Origen, Justin Martyr, St Anthony, and St. Augustine to the various Christian heretical sects, such as the Gnostics, Cathars, and Waldensians. It then traces the rise of the Devil to prominence in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and his role in the rise of the witchcraze of the 16th and 17th centuries. At this time, there was such an obsession with the concept of Satan and his minions that a complex demonology grew up around him, created by theologians, clerics, jurists, and crackpots. As time passed, the fearful influence of the Devil waned as belief in spirits and demons passed into the realm of superstition and Satan was reduced to little more than an advertising ploy and horror movie cliche. As it was with Christianity, so it is in the secular world as well: Satan Sells.

Russell's introduction gives an excellent overview to a fascinating and complex subject and hopefully will lead to an even more in-depth investigation of the most feared being in history, that Father of Lies and Seducer of All the World called the Devil and Satan.

An amazing, fascinating, intellectually stimulating book on a subject too often the province of cranks, fanatics, or frauds--the Devil himself. Russell, a California history professor, has written several volumes on Lucifer, and this is the most far-ranging. An in-depth study that traces the history of the Devil from his shadowy origins in the desert wastes of the Middle East and of course even further back, in Africa; follows him through Judaism and early Christianity to the Middle Ages, up through the Reformation and Age of Enlightenment, right through to the Holocaust and the post-modern world. Russell explores theology, folklore, literature, and history to piece together this ultimate symbol of evil. From early church writers such as Origen and Tertullian to Milton and Dante, to Baudelaire, de Sade, Dostoevski and Flannery O'Connor, Russell looks at the ways in which the Devil has been personified for different ages. Highly readable, packed with accurate and well-researched information, this should appeal to anyone with an interest in comparative religions, mythology, or history. This really is perhaps the definitive book on the figure of the Devil, although I would also recommend Paul Carus' "The Devil and the Idea of Evil," Alice Turner's "The History of Hell" and Homer Smith's "Man and His Gods."

Christopher Columbus was a radical who thought that the earth was round while everyone around him believed the earth was flat. That's the history that most of us are taught, but it's wrong. The fallacy of this view and the intellectual fraud that perpetrated it are explained in Jeffrey Burton Russell's short book.

There were a few medieval "flat earthers," to be sure. Russell explains, though, that no one of any stature was influenced whatsoever by them, and especially not by Cosmas Indicopleustes, who has been given undue attention by writers eager to hold him up as typical of the period.

The ancient Greeks believed that the earth was a globe. Modern historians invented, and in some cases continue to teach, that this knowledge was suppressed by the Catholic church in the middle ages. According to Russell, the church did not stand athwart history yelling "Stop!" Augustine, Origen, and Bede, as well as other Christian intellectuals, acknowledged the sphericity of the earth.

People living in the middle ages, if they thought about such matters at all, could see that the earth was likely a sphere. After all, the hull of a ship disappeared over the horizon before the mast did. The stars also provided evidence that the world was not flat. Russell convincingly shows that the concept of a "dark age," during which the ancient Greek and Roman knowledge was lost, is pure fantasy and was promulgated by modern historians in part to make their own work at "reinterpreting" the classics seem more profound. The "Flat Error," as Russell calls it, was amplified over time as some intellectuals repeated the claim of earlier secondary sources without checking the primary sources for the evidence.

Dr. Jeffrey Burton Russell is Professor of History at the University of California. I have no idea where the last reviewer got his information that he was a theologian. Since he obviously prides himself on his scientific rationalism, he should check his facts more carefully...

This is a neat little book, almost too short a book, in which Jeffrey Russell aims to make clear to a popular audience what professional medieval historians have known for years: that the cherished modern notion that all medieval minds thought the earth was flat is simply false. Yet setting the record straight is not Russell's only concern, for in the second half of the book he engages in a historiographical account of how nineteenth century writers invented the notion.
Anyone familiar medieval intellectual history has encountered innumerable references to the spherical earth. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Roger Bacon, writers of travel narratives like John Mandeville, and many others all assumed sphericity (Aquinas, writing around 1250, even offers the statement "the world is round" as an example of something so obvious it needs no proof). In this respect, trying to "prove" that medieval intellectuals did not think the earth was flat is a bit challenging-how does one begin? Russell does a pretty good job, beginning with the controversy over Columbus' voyage (which had nothing to do with the shape of the earth, but was about its circumference), and working backward in a vain attempt to find evidence of flat earth belief. In the process he comes across only five indisputable "flat earthers," at least two of whom were ridiculed during the Middle Ages for being so silly as to be unaware the earth was a sphere. The main culprit is Cosmas Indicopleustes, who thought the earth was flat and beneath a vaulted heaven shaped like a tent. Most people who accuse all medieval people of being "flat-earthers" rest their case on Cosmas, but he was unknown in western Europe (since there was no Latin translation of his Greek work), and at least two Greek-speaking scholars during the Middle Ages dismissed him as a quack.
After making relatively short work of the actual geographical knowledge of medieval Europe, Russell charts the progress of the myth of the medieval flat earth, and traces it from the late 18th and early 19th century to the present (with a focus on the mid to late 19th). In this section of the book the author poses some fundamental questions about how and why history is written, and about the very notion of "modernity." For the general reader, this section may hold less appeal than the opening chapters on medieval geography.
The book is not perfect. Short shrift is given to flat earth traditions outside of medieval Christianity, including the Near Eastern tradition that accounts for some language suggesting a flat earth in the Old Testament (such references would not have troubled medieval theologians, who did not necessarily privilege the literal sense of scripture). Also Russell should have made more of the association of the medieval belief in the flat earth (myth) with the medieval belief in the geocentric universe (fact). The acceptance of the idea that the Middle Ages believed in the flat earth has been abetted by the ecclesiastical opposition towards Galileo and other early modern heliocentrists, and Russell brushes this aside too quickly. Occasionally, Russell wears his own religious beliefs on his sleeve, and this will discomfit some readers.
In general, however, this is a good attempt to discuss medieval geographical knowledge and question our assumptions about modernity. For some of my friends this book has been pretty bewildering, since the myth Russell destroys is so firmly ingrained in our culture. It is nice to see more popular books, like Lies My Teacher Told Me, continue to attack the myth.

Warning - This book has very little to do with dust! Actually, with his book Dust - A History Of The Small & The Invisible Joseph Amato demonstrates an inability to focus on any one topic for more than a paragraph at a time and obfuscates what otherwise should have been a rich and interesting topic below a morass of historical anecdotes. I was thoroughly disappointed. Effective historians have a natural ability to absorb volumes of information, select those facts and events which are important, and weave them into a coherent, interesting narrative. While Mr. Amato's 41 pages of supporting notes and 15 page bibliography suggest that comprehensive research was performed on the topic, no amount of references or notes can make up for his failure to focus on important aspects of "Dust's" history and inability to create from them an interesting story. If you are looking for a rewarding, enlightening read, look elsewhere.

This bright and sprightly stroll through the human relationship with the minute comes to a surprisingly dark conclusion.

Joseph Amato, Professor of Intellectual and Cultural History at a small college in southwestern Minnesota, tells an interesting, if familiar, tale. Dust was long defined by its occupation of the lowest position on the scale of the visible ('pollen' is the Latin word for 'dust'), and it symbolized insignificance and near-nothingness. Then came Western - now global - science. Dust became a multiform heap of material objects within a certain range of sizes ("With so much known about the invisible, dust can never again be ordinary," he writes), while at the same time ever more powerful instruments pushed ever further toward zero the notion of the infinitesimal. Meanwhile, civil authorities find themselves in a constant scramble to adapt to science's new insights into the implications for human well-being.

Prof. Amato is at his best in his survey of these societal responses to the news from the microcosm, and has interesting and upbeat things to say about the history of health, housekeeping, and hygiene. (He is much weaker on the scientific and intellectual side of things. I found particularly regrettable his neglect of Lovejoy's classic *The Great Chain of Being* - a work he cites in the notes but shows no sign of having assimilated.)

But the reader who arrives at the end of this brief volume is likely to be surprised at the author's take on the prospects of our increasing mastery of what is minute affecting our imaginative lives. In an essay written in the early twenties entitled "Subject-Matter of Poetry," Aldous Huxley expressed amazement that "The subject-matter of the new poetry remains the same as that of the old. The boundaries have not been extended. There would be real novelty in the new poetry if it had, for example, taken to itself any of the new ideas and astonishing facts with which the new science has endowed the modern world. There would be real novelty in it if it had worked out a satisfactory artistic method for dealing with abstractions. It has not." The concluding chapter of *Dust*, entitled "Who Will Tremble at These Marvels?" attempts to explain why not, and in doing so takes into a minor key what had till then seemed to be a work written in a major mode. This chapter, together with the touching ten-page memoir of his mother's relation to dust presented in an appendix, are the best things in the book.

So much of our world's business energy and investment capital go into information technology and biotechnology, which are fields where most of the important technology is so small as to be invisible to normal human vision. Author Amato explores how the human drive to improve our lives and our world led us (from the 16th century on) to see, measure, manipulate and control ever smaller particles and entities. The mysteries of dust, and then germs, then atoms, and now subatomic particles, viruses and prions, one by one "bit the dust" as they were revealed by this compelling quest. Bearing an amazing array of facts and stories (like the best musty and dusty library stacks I remember from college) as well as an approach both philisophic and humane, Amamto is an entertaining guide on this journey from bulbonic plague to Hoover vacuums to semiconductor plant clean rooms. I think his book helps explain the deep hopes and fears (and the high market valuations) our age invests in our interaction with unseen.

This third installment in Dr. Russell's series (The Devil, Satan, Lucifer, Mephistopheles) comes to the Middle Ages, which means that we are well beyond source material in Canaanite and Jewish legend and now into the development of the devil in Patristic literature, and onwards.

On the plus side this is the historical period where Russell is an expert so you would expect it to be the strongest of the three volumes. On the minus side, in this volume, as with the others, one is constantly uneasy that the historical perspective is being underpinned by the author's own belief in a literal fallen heavenly being, and too often it is not clear whether the focus is medieval society or metaphysics.

Incidentally, anyone buying this book because of the word 'Lucifer' in the title will be disappointed that Russell does not address how the specific concept of 'Lucifer' developed from Origen and Augustine onwards. Neither here, nor in the previous volume 'Satan', does Dr Russell deal in any depth with the process by which a name which for the first 4 centuries of Christianity was used as a title of Christ (because the Latin word Lucifer appears in the Latin Vulgate as Peter's "day star"), to the point that early Christians used to name their children Lucifer (eg Bishop Lucifer of Cagliari), suddenly by the 5th and 6th centuries was being used as a title for a fallen angel (based on Isaiah 14:12 being reapplied).

This book was a pleasure to read. Like the two previous volumes, Lucifer was an enlightenment. The evoultion of the "lightbearer" becomes more exciting as Russell progresses to the modern age. This volume, focusing on the Middle Ages, solitifies some philisophical beliefs of evil, matter and its representation in literature(specifically Dantes Inferno). I strongly recommend picking up this book(and reading it).

This I think is without question the weakest of all four volumes of this series, in that it doesn't address the real question surrounding the devil in early Christianity which is "where did the Christian devil come from?". It will be obvious to most readers familiar with Jewish background to the New Testament that the NT devil comes virtually out of the blue. One can point to only two significant Satans in the whole OT (Job's and Zechariah's - one poetic, one prophetic) and then suddenly in the NT there is an explosion in diabolic activity from page 1 (35 mentions of "devil", 35 of "Satan", plus various synonyms such as "prince of this world"). Yet one searches in vain for anything in the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha and Dead Sea Scrolls that prefigures the NT devil.

Why? This is the $64,000 question. But Russell doesn't address it - he allows his own personal faith in an everpresent fallen angel (from Eden?) to buck the issue that puzzles everyone confronted with the sudden upgrade of the devil in early Christianity, and what we get is a pedestrian walk through of early Christian devil belief without even attempting to explain this radical departure both from the Old Testament and also contemporary Judaism. Nor does Russell explore Paul's equally radical concept of the Old Man versus the New Man as a spiritual battle. If this isn't relevant to the NT devil, what is?

This book is written by Jeffrey Burton Russell professor of History at the University of California. It is his second volume about the history of concept of the Devil, first published 1981. Satan: The early christian tradition tracks the first five centuries of the christian church. There are lot of questions in these book concerning the origin of evil in this world and the existence of the Devil. What was the nature of his fall? Where is he now? Can he be saved? Going through history with the guidance of J.F.Russell we see in what way the early church fathers tried to answer questions like these. It is also interesting to see why some early christians preferred martyrdom while others become monks. And here you find the basis for persecutions of heretics and witches for centuries! To my mind this is a good literature about the first five centuries of Christian history.

A book tracing the evolution of witchcraft through the Middle Ages is a very promising topic. On the surface, it seems that this would provide great insight into the beginnings of the "witchcraze" of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. However, the idea is flawed from the start. The Middle Ages provides few primary sources and the records are spotty at best. The information he provides about the trials of heretics are often second hand accounts. At one point, he cites a confession from a work that was written 50 years later. He assimilates what limited information he can get and then he is forced to make leaps to his conclusions.
The logic of his conclusions is based on the idea that similarities between heretics and witches implies that witches existed as heretics. This, of course, ignores any other possibilities that may have caused such similarities. He downplays or ignores inversion all together (the accusations of witches were merely the opposite of what was considered "proper"). In addition, he fails to provide any evidence that witches existed in reality at all (I have yet to find convincing evidence that witches existed outside of people's minds).
Overall, this book provides a nice overview of medieval heretics, but any broader application to witchcraft must be very cautiously applied. If your grasping at straws trying to find some "historical reality" to modern witch beliefs (wicca, etc) you may find some support here. Be cautioned, he attacks Margaret Murray's idea of the survival of a pagan fertility cult into Earl Modern Europe.

WITCHCRAFT IN THE MIDDLE AGES by Jeffrey Russell is a salient and well-written history about religious persecution during the Middle Ages involving individuals accused of the practice of "witchcraft". WITCHCRAFT was first published in the early 1970s when a renewed interest in the craft was gaining public attention.

Adherents of the craft have suffered a severe and enduring persecution--worse than any other religious persecution--including that of the Jews. Even today, in an era when folks pat themselves on the back for their religious "tolerence" and/or secular outlook, "witchcraft" is still largely misunderstood. Even the name is a misnomer.

Russell, who seems mostly objective, refers to the modern practice of "witchcraft" as "puerile" indicating he does not really understand the practice per se. Russell is not a participant-observer, he is an outsider examining in as objective a manner as possible events that transpired over a period of thousand years. He does not examine and order these events from the perspective of the practicioner being persecuted, he arranges them from the standpoint of the authories who now wonder what happened.

Russell says currently there are four views extant in the West concerning "witchcraft" -- mainstream Roman Catholics, Protestants and Jewish groups pretty much ignore it; Fundamentalist Judeo-Christian groups see it as a "clear and present danger" and "the work of the devil"; Liberals see it as silly or sick behaviour ignorant church people persecute and mentally deranged and confused souls practice; Ethnographers describe "witchcraft" as worldwide and real, with devoted adherents.

In the Middle Ages, the practice of "witchcraft" was associated with the diverse behaviors of various individuals or groups who for one reason or another found themselves on the wrong side of church law--first Roman Catholic and then Protestant Reformed. Russell says amazingly, individuals who participated in the Renaissance and Reformation, who overturned, destroyed, and abandoned many of the practices of the Church of Rome, retained the Catholic position on "witchcraft" and persecuted people suspected of the practice with a vengence unequaled by their predecessors.

Russell examines the roots of the Chistian attitude toward witchcraft. He says that during the Babylonian captivity, when the Jews were cruelly carried off and enslaved, they came to accept the reality of evil. Through their efforts to understand and deal with evil, they accepted it must have a creator, i.e. a source. But how can a good God be the source of evil? Enter the devil.

Russell says the dual thinking of the Jews (God and Satan--he provides many Biblical references to Satan--including the book of JOB), combined with the Greco-Roman belief in daemons (angelic entities who communicated with the gods) influenced thinking in the newly evolved Christian world. As the Church fathers grappled with folk beliefs that included Roman lares/penates and Celtic/Germanic Valkyries, fairies, elves and other supernatural folks, they came to believe Satan ruled all these magical creatures.

During the Middle Ages, individuals punished for "witchcraft" (evil practicies associated with Satan) fell into a number of different categories. Russell attempts to tease these categories apart and determine what "witchcraft" was (the concept and definition changed over time) and who exactly engaged in the practices that came to be viewed as "witchcraft" (many people of diverse interest and background did many different things--or were accused of doing these things).

Russell says for the most part, the church viewed individuals accused of "witchcraft" as heretics--i.e. engaged in non-church approved religious practices. The most famous example is the Cathars. Cathars were accused of witchcraft based on their dualistic belief in the brothers Jesus and Satan. Some non-Cathars accused of "witchcraft" were probably mentally deranged if their testimony is to be belived and the church on occasion recognized these sick souls for what they were--in writing. There were those accused of witchcraft, however, who were engaging in magical practices involving herbs, charms, illness, childbirth, and other aspects of daily living. Early records indicate these souls existed long before the church took an interest in their behavior. Much of what these practicioners believed and did was an outgrowth of their pagan beliefs. Russell says the brothers have Grimm recorded much of their belief system as "fairytales".

"Witchcraft" and its adherents came to be viewed as evil because the church could not condone magic practiced outside God's proscribed domain--and of course the church leaders determined what that domain was so this was basically a control issue. The church itself practiced magic--there is no other way to describe prayer and indulgences designed to manipulate God. The miracles of Christ and the Saints--turning water into wine, walking on water, raising the dead, expanding fishes and loaves to feed the multitude, etc. may be divine magic but are nevertheless magic.

Russell has divided his book into several chapters that deal with early, middle, and late phases of the Middle Ages. He notes that while some would define the later years as early Renaissance, he defines the Middle ages from the years following the demise of Rome's rule in Europe to the end of the 1400s when the Church in Rome lost control of Christianity in Europe.

This is an exellent book and a good place to start if you want to know more about the church's persecution of people accused of "witchcraft" during the Middle Ages. If you want to know more about "witchcraft", wicca or whatever you call the practice, I suggest DRAWING DOWN THE MOON by Margot Adler.

It is rare for me to find myself giving a book a very bad rating. For one thing, I reserve one star for books that do more harm than good, and there are really few works that have no redeeming value. For another, I make a real effort not to buy books in that category, since it's a waste of my time. This book, "The Devil," caught me by surprise. I expected one thing and got something else entirely. I'm not sure if it's my expectations or the book itself that are the source of my disappointment, but I will go with my instincts for now.

What did I expect? A good historical and anthropological study about the role of the devil or devils in human history up to the beginnings of Christianity. In particular, I was interested in demonic legends in first millennium BCE Israel. What did I get? I guess the best way to put it is that, had the subtitle should have been "Jeffrey Russell's Perceptions of Evil..." I would have been less surprised.

The reader gets an early warning when, in the preface, Russell starts out with "This is a work of history, not of theology" and then immediately begins discussing theological and metaphysical issues. Russell's style is reminiscent of a Victorian churchman/academic, rambling from one subject to another in mid-paragraph, regularly making portentous statements that seem to have no basis in fact. In fact, one of his most unusual quirks is to state a premise, actually indicate that there is either no or conflicting evidence for it, and then go on to use it for further logical gyrations. This is an argument style better suited to politicians than academics.

Gradually it becomes clear that Russell has at least one hidden agenda. He is intent on making a case for the dualistic nature of God. This causes him to flit from one isolated fact to another, skipping over any material in between that it in conflict with this theory. The worst examples of this are in the section entitled "Hebrew Personifications of Evil." As most people know, outside of the Job and the unfortunate snake, the Old Testament makes very little mention of the demonic. There were some beliefs, but they are discussed more in sacred materials external to the Bible, dating from the Babylonian Exile onward. Russell misses that material, pays attention to Job, and then focuses entirely on several books of the Apocrypha as evidence of Hebrew dualism. In the process he skips an entire millennia or so of Jewish thinking. This is not exactly history.

I don't know quite what to make of an academic historical text which, in the end, turns out to have been a soapbox for a writer's own orations on the nature and place of evil (with a capital E). But I do know that I don't like it one bit. If the volume have been clearly labeled as philosophy or theology, I would have gone on to find something else, and this problem would not have arisen.

The book attempts to cover ancient, classical, Hebrew and early Christian civilization. As it is, regardless of Russell's qualifications as a medievalist, he seems a bit out of his depth in the fields of ancient and biblical history. There is an extensive bibliography, of which I know many of the citations. Surprisingly, it appears that Russell's sources are much less biased than he is himself. If you must buy this book, I suggest you use it to key into other authors and thinkers rather than as a conclusive resource on it's own.

This is an old book(1977). It is also a disappointing book. It is disappointing because it does not really analyze the concept of the Devil as an Anti-God. Rather,it chronicles the various destroying gods of ancient mythologies (including American Indian gods which had no bearing on the development of primitive Christianity) and how these related to the concept of evil in Christianity.

Russell states that " This is a work of history, not of theology"(Preface). Despite this, he begins the book by expounding his personal concept of evil: "The essence of evil is abuse of a sentient being,a being that can feel pain."(Chapter I) While one can sympathize with this feeling, it is hard to defend if one considers animals to be sentient beings ( and even have souls, if Anatole France can be believed in Penguin Island). Further it raises the question of whether the ways of God are completely understood by man. Thus despite his denial, we are immediately plunged into theology.

He also has difficulty with his history of the personification of evil as exemplified by the Devil. Occasionally this type of evil can be personified in a demon, but often not. For example, in discussing Plato, he notes that "evil has no real being at all".

More frequently he focuses on the dualistic nature of good and evil. In this discussion he loses his way in the complicated theology of whether this means that there are two equal forces managing human affairs, or whether there is one supreme force, with a subsidiary counter force, or whether there is only one force whose ways are inscrutable to man. These discussions are not particularly helpful to us in analyzing mythology or theology. Both have been done better and in greater detail by others.

The one virtue of this book is its brevity. It can serve as an introduction to students who are not familiar with the antecedents of Christianity or of the various struggles that theologians and philosophers have had with the issues of good and evil.

This is a wonderful book that shows how the Christian conception of the Devil can be traced to previous cultures through myths, symbols, and philosophy. The book starts will the definition and how the word has been interrupted through various cultures, including current Jung psychology which Russell favors. The book then progresses through how east and western cultures view the idea of evil. Summerian, Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Cannanite, Hiittie, Zoroastrianism, Mazdaism, Greek, and Roman mythology and cultures are used for comparison. The book ends with Hebrew personification and the Devil in the New Testament. Many references are mentioned regarding the Inquisition, which Russell picks up in the next book of this series.

Christian readers will probably be offended by Russell's conclusions, because he indirectly shows that ideas presented in the Bible have been presented in other cultures pre-dating Christianity. This historical approach is taken by other authors, but may jar Christians who have not been subjective to this line of thinking. This is my guess why this book has received bad reviews here at Amazon, but receives great reviews on history book lists. Granted that some of Russell's conclusions are subjective, but the history is solid and that is why it's a standard work.