Well it’s Halloween today, and I thought I had better make a post to give you something to read before the trick-or-treaters come to set fire to your cat. Here’s a review of the two books that I have managed to read since September. Enjoy!
Demonology Past and Present – Kurt Koch
Kregel -1973
Satan, Satanism and Witchcraft – Richard W. DeHaan
Zondervan – 1972
These ones aren’t just shitty books; they’re actually shit books. I have barely any free time anymore, and so I have to limit my leisure reading to my Sunday morning craps. Being in school has made it so that those holiest of moments on the Sabbath are now my only opportunity to read about Satan without feeling irresponsible. (I used to limit my toilet reading to the collection of Poe’s poems that I kept under the bathroom sink. Whenever my phone was out of battery and I couldn’t play solitaire while pinching a loaf, I would treat myself to an old ‘Edgar Allan Poo’.)
As you have probably guessed, these two books are awful. They came as part of a collection I purchased a few years ago from a hippy lady in the suburbs. She was selling a collection of 6 books, only 2 of which I actually wanted to read. I have since read and reviewed all 4 of the books that I was not interested in, but the ones I wanted have remained on the shelf. Anyways, both of these books deal with the topic of Satanism from a Christian point of view, and unsurprisingly, they are both repulsively stupid.
Let’s consider the authors for a moment. One of them is named Kurt Koch. Old Kurty is a classic case of “Koch by name; Koch by nature”. And what about his companion; Mr. Richard W. DeHaan? Well, they say that a picture speaks a thousand words, but the below picture only seems to repeat the word ‘wanker’ a thousand times.
As i have probably mentioned elsewhere, I find it fascinating to read the ideas of people who take each word of the Bible as being literally true. Let’s be completely honest here; 99% of the time, when a non-christian comes into contact with a christian, the non christian can instantly be sure of the fact that they are more intelligent than the christian. Oftentimes though, we can give the christian the benefit of the doubt; although the person claims to be a christian, it can be safely assumed that they have not actually read the bible. When a person has actually read the bible and still claims to be a christian, you can safely infer that that person is an imbecile of the lowest order. To all whom encounter them, rubes of this variety seem to be entirely incapable of thinking critically.
On closer inspection though, these people are capable of a form of critical thinking. Unfortunately, the logic on which they base their thought is both flawed and perverse. Instead of using reason to reason, they use fear, prejudice and a unhealthy splash of utter nonsense. The authors of these two books are particularly fond of this approach. They weave a web of dogma around the topics of Satan and Satanism, and make themselves look like a pair of proper fools. One of the big points that both authors push is that many people who are having problems with their mental health are actually possessed by a demon and more in need of an exorcist than a psychologist or a doctor! My favourite argument that is put forth in either of these books though, is DeHaans argument for the consistency of the Bible’s attitude towards witchcraft. There has always been a bit of a problem with this issue; despite the infamous “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” rule, there are actually quite a few witchy characters in the bible. There is a particular incident in Genesis when Jacob plays with some sticks to alter the appearance of the lambs being born to Laban’s flock. (Gen 30:37-43) He peels patterns into the bark on some sticks, and the animals who mate near the sticks will give birth to offspring with a similar pattern on their fur. Now let’s think about that for a moment. If a woman were to have attempted something similar to this 500 years ago, she would almost definitely have been burnt as a witch. If somebody was to do something similar in the 1970s, the authors of these books would likely have attempted to perform an exorcism on them. How then does DeHaan get around the fact that Jacob, grandson of Abraham himself, was a dirty, occulting, sorcerer? Well, it turns out that God was actually trolling Jacob; he had organised the sheep to mate a certain way, and Jacob’s twigs never had any effect. Therefore, the sticks were a waste of time and Jacob hadn’t actually done magic. That’s fair enough, but DeHaan seems to think that this gets Jacob off the hook; however, it doesn’t change the fact that Jacob attempted to do magic. Just because he was a shit sorcerer doesn’t mean he wasn’t a sorcerer. It’s all about intent, you fucking dope DeHaan. (On a depressing side note, I just looked it up, and it seems that many people are still seriously discussing the tenability of Jacob’s approach to genetic engineering.) DeHaan’s twisted defenses of other biblical witches are just as unsatisfying, but this is hardly surprising. He is stretching the prim, white blanket of reason over an awkward, shit-brown, virulent mass of obtuse, dogmatic rubbish.
There was one cool part of DeHaan’s book where he lists some other books that you shouldn’t read. I haven’t heard of these, and maybe he made them up, but I’m sure as hell going to keep an eye out for them in the future. Let me know if you have copies!!!
To conclude; these two books were truly moronic. Don’t waste your time with this kind of crap unless you’re crapping. School is really getting intense now, so it’ll probably be another little while before I post anything else. In the meantime, have a good Halloween, listen to metal, worship Satan and remember to keep it anti-christian!
Nocturnal Revelries 
I actually never thought christians would take the time to write about satanism o_O° at least not enough to fill a book… as for the books mentioned I don’t think I have them, at least not in english but good luck on your hunt!
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I spent a bit of time looking those up. It seems the same list of books appeared in several different christian books on the occult. Somebody else already did the research on their veracity. It seems that they’re all made up. The dumb christian who wrote the list didn’t want their readers actually reading grimoires.
“The Black Raven is book two of the Dragon Mage fiction series by writer Katherine Kerr (the first book being The Red Wyvern. I believe that “The Enchanted Words of Black Forest” may be an inept attempt to list another fantasy series, this by author Patricia C. Wrede: The Enchanted Forest Chronicles. I believe that “The Genuine Fiery Dragon” might be a reference to the grimoire called The Red Dragon. Saints Blessings: Wisdom and Guidance Inspired By The World’s Most Beloved Saints, is a recent book by Meera Lester which clearly has nothing to do with magic. “The Little Book of Romanus” may be a reference to the Virgilius Romanus, an illustrated book which dates back to Fifth century Ireland which has been kept at the Vatican since the papacy of Sixtus VI (1471-84). It isn’t a book of magic either. I searched numerous catalogues and could not find any reference to “The Spring Book” or “The Spiritual Shield””
from: http://www.witchvox.com/va/dt_article.html?a=cabc&id=8557
I have a feeling that the actual list was composed before some of the books in the above quote were written. I found a grimoirey ‘The Black Raven’ online, but it is possible that somebody just took the title out of the list and stuck it onto an already existing book of magic. Here it is anyways.
Click to access Johannes_Faust_-_The_Black_Raven.pdf
Also, ‘the Little Book of Romanus’ is referenced in Jacob Grimm’s book on Teutonic mythology. So who knows, maybe the other books do exist.
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Great post! I think De Haan besides being a fucking idiot is also plagiarising some poorly translated German source. Everything from the Sixth Book of Moses onwards is a pseudonymous grimoire, some come in sets of several “Mosaic” books, some individually and I think most of them were authored during the Renaissance so I’m not sure which specific books he’s referring to. The little book of Romanus is a shitty translation of the German Romanus-buchlein, the book of the Roma, which is an 18th century German collection of gypsy magic. http://www.esotericarchives.com/moses/romanus.htm The genuine fiery dragon does seem to be The Grand Grimoire, called Le veritable dragon rouge in Haiti.
There were many Raven-themed German grimoires in the 18th century, so there’s many books of ravens or featuring ravens and some of them are known to be fictitious since then. It would be funnier if he meant the Black Pullet though which you can also translate as the Black Cock, and judging by the way he fucks up his translations it’s not completely unlikely. Saint’s Blessing, might either refer to some work by Ernest Houssay who went by the name Abbe Julio or the far more famous Cyprianarium, a pseudonymous grimoire by Saint Cyprian. That’s usually popular in Spain and Scandinavia.
I have absolutely no clue what the Spiritual Shield, Spring Book and the Enchanted Words of the Black Forest are. They’re either also bad translations of German or Scandinavian grimoires to the point of completely obscuring the real titles, or mayyybe mangled titles for books by Dion Fortune or a number of theosophists if they’re not made up. They have a hint of that GoldenDawny poetic sensibility about them. But eh, Christian authors also love to make shit up but I’d expect them to go for something more ominous than Book of Spring.
There’s also the possibility that he was rewording the book titles to avoid getting caught plagiarising his source and I’m absolutely positive he had one because this little list contains both extremely obscure grimoires that are far from popular and very well known ones like the Mosaic stuff and the Grand Grimoire. Very bloody odd selection.
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Wow, what a comprehensive response! Thanks for input bud. It’s kind of funny when you think about it. Many people argue for the efficacy of grimoires that have been proven to be hoaxed on the basis that the power comes from the practitioner rather than authenticity of the text; I wonder if the wickedness of these mysterious tomes is made legitimate by the terror of those who fear them.
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Well, hoaxed doesn’t always imply completely fictitious but people were more likely to take something seriously if it was written by Moses or Solomon or some other legendary figure rather than some random Central-European mage who could have been making shit up. However, from the 1500s onwards -when it became a sales oriented thing with the printing press and all- most of these books are basically the product of unscrupulous publishers who recognised a thirst for mystical and scary tomes so they either completely made shit up or re-branded and reworked bullshitty texts to make more money.
From a practitioner’s point of view I love those things. Anyone who would take everything they read in a random grimoire at face value and believe all the claims of anonymous, unreliable authors definitely deserve to fall into the trap of being complete idiots and stay there. There are lots of things that go bump in the night that love to mislead people who use these things for all the wrong reasons.
But basically I don’t think it’s all in the practitioner. It’s pretty much the same as making a blog post asking for web banking help and hoping that your mates will see it and at the same time believing that any anonymous commenter that will reply (in broken English) is one of your mates just because he says he is and he won’t just empty your account as soon as you give them the password.
Owen Davies has written a pretty good history of the whole grimoire tradition called Grimoires: A history of magic books. Check it out if you’re interested, it’s a more fun read than 90% of the actual grimoires.
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Hahaha, yeah I guess you’re right about that! Thank you so much for the recommendation my friend! I will definitely try to hunt down a copy of Davies’ book when I have a bit of cash!
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The same principle applies to the Gospels; neither of them were actually written by any of Jesus’ disciples, but by nameless Christians who lived at least one generation after the disciples. The stories were originally oral traditions that were then written down and credited to the disciples so that they would appear to have greater legitimacy – just like crediting a medieval grimoire to Moses or King Solomon.
My view of “reality” is that it’s kind of wibbly-wobbly, and that even something that starts as a hoax can later have real, legitimate meaning for people, as well as a real and lasting effect on their lives. (This can be good or bad, depending on context.) Does this magic really come from outside of ourselves, or does it come from within? Who the hell knows? All I know is, I think those evangelical Christians who capitalize on the devil to manipulate their flocks are some of the most accomplished black magicians in history.
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The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses are another of those cheap mass printed grimoires that became popular among Southern Conjure/Hoodoo practitioners. Originated in Germany iirc.
If you are looking to conjure a pillar of fire or turn your wizard’s staff into a snake like Moses then this is grimoire for you. Probably worth a peek if you have the time. Not hard to find. There are a few versions out there.
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