This is a rather short work, one written in the middle of the 19th century. Marketed to young, middle and upper middle class females, it is a sort of pagan primer- one which outcompeted contemporary works by amusingly including Hindu and Egyptian material alongside the then-standard Greek and Roman.
This amusing aside does not detract from the content- it is as good as any similar...
This is one of the flat-out weirdest works I've ever edited; a short work, it treats on poetry and prose related to vampires, details both blood drinking and psychic attack, and altogether appears to endorse the concept that literal vampires- that is, in the strain of Dracula, able to keep a corpse semi-alive or appear in apparitional form- are both real and very dangerous....
This little work is a nice little addition to the spiritual library being amassed here- it isn't about magic though, it's actually a reformist tract from the godfather of agnosticism aimed at bringing the idea of Hell and Satan low. It's a pretty good two pronged argument too, since it focuses on the rational (contraditions in the Bible, etc) and the emotional (the ethics of such...
