Maurice Bessy: A Pictorial History of Magic and the Supernatural

Originally published in French in 1961 under the title Histoire en 1000 images de la magie, this particular book first saw an English-language publication in 1964.  As the title would suggest, this is a picture-heavy book.  It covers magical and religious practices of ancient societies, obscure tribes, and modern groups.  Being a book focused around images, the text is generally concise, rather than going into depth on any given topic.

Front cover of English-language edition

What is possibly the book's greatest impact is a rather simple thing.  A copy of this book belonged to Anton LaVey back in the 1960s around the time he formed the Church of Satan.  It was from this book that the Church got the Baphomet symbol now associated with the Church and modern Satanism in general.  The book even appears in some early publicity photos for the Church of Satan, as under the dustjacket, printed in white on the black cover of the book is the symbol, making for a rather effective prop for the photos.

Front cover of the book without the dustjacket


While not the most in-depth book on such subject matter, that is perfectly fine as that isn't the goal of the book and it does have a fairly good overview of religion and supernatural beliefs.  It can certainly serve as a starting point for somebody interested in such things, helping them find specific ideas they would like to learn more about.  The heavy use of images is also rather nice.  Some books will mention things by name, but you won't necessarily know what the author means.  This book will show you a symbol, for instance, and give you some information about it. In some ways, it is a bit like an encyclopedia, where you get a short description of a topic (even if certain entries are more in-depth than others), but if you really want to get into a particular topic, that encyclopedia would only be a starting point, at best.  Certainly, this is an interesting book that is worth picking up if you happen across it.

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