The Oxford book of the supernatural - D. J Enright

The supernatural has this in common with nature: you may drive it out with a pitchfork, but it will constantly come running back. At a time when science and technology are proving ambivalent in their effects and institutionalized religion is weakened by self-inflicted wounds, interest in the supernatural is insatiable. This sweeping anthology presents material in which, touchingly, eerily, or bizarrely, the supernatural and the natural meet and ignite, illuminating our deepest anxieties, frailties, and hopes. While chiefly concerned with specific instances, it gives due weight to the views of philosophers and of lovers and lost souls. Mixing what is advanced as fact with what is offered as fiction, it takes in hauntings both malignant and benign, magic, vampires and other popular monsters, witches and fairies, the devil seeking whom he may devour, sex and the supernatural, dreams and coincidences, daemonic influences in art, comedies of the occult, near-death experiences and after-death expectations. The closing section sums up the war between believers and disbelievers and touches on the processes of reading and of writing about the subject.;This book is intended for those interested in the supernatural, ghosts, etc. and the literature thereof, practising spiritualists, readers of the Gothic, the occult.