Free The Sorcerer's Companion: A Guide to the Magical World of Harry Potter by Allan Zola Kronzek, Elizabeth Kronzek

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    All those demons floating around could hardly be good news. During the era of witch persecution in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, demons became widely associated with witchcraft. Both witches and demons were servants of the Devil, and witches were said to use demons to perform many of their wicked deeds. Most alarming, demons were believed to enter people’s bodies and “possess” them, causing the kind of symptoms that would now be diagnosed as epilepsy or a form of mental illness. Often, demonic possession was attributed to a witch who had placed the demon on a morsel of food eaten by the victim.
    Because they were once wise angels, demons were also believed to possess a storehouse of valuable knowledge about such diverse subjects as mathematics, medicinal herbs, geometry, flying, and how to become invisible. This made it extremely tempting for would-be sorcerers to try to contact them and gain access to their secrets. But demons were quite wily, and according to popular lore had many ways to harm or destroy those foolish enough to attempt to communicate with them. Summoning demons was a highly illegal activity, and in many parts of Europe was punishable by death.

     
    ( photo credit 18.3 )
     

 

 
If you’re worried that demons lurk in every dark alley, you may be able to draw some comfort from the ability to recognize one when you see it. Although demons hail from many lands, they do share a number of physical characteristics that make them hard to miss.
Most demons walk upright and combine recognizable human features with those of a beast. More than one head is common, as is either an abundance or a shortage of fingers and toes. Many demons sport batlike wings, tails, talons, and horns—though they usually tuck these appendages out of sight when they go out stalking prey. Their mouths are often grotesque and distorted, with jutting fangs and long curly tongues. Some have no skin, and almost all have half their bodies covered by scales or feathers.
The dead giveaway for most demons, however, is their feet. While the rest of the creature may resemble a beautiful woman, a three-headed tiger, or anything else you might imagine, the feet will always be those of a goat, pig, rooster, or goose, or in the case of a water demon, the tail of a fish or snake.

 
     
    Still, not all demons are associated with Dark forces. In some cultures, demons aren’t interested in leading men into the ways of evil; they merely want to have them for supper! In other cases, they attack only to defend their territories—the woods, mountains, deserts, lakes, and rivers where they commonly dwell—from human invasion. But throughout the world, demons represent all that is scary, both in the natural world and inside ourselves. Like people, demons will rant and rage, scheme and plot, deceive and seduce, and display boundless energy (they “work like demons”) to get what they want. Fortunately, in almost all cases, demons can be outwitted—the most powerful weapons against them being human ingenuity, truth, love, and in many cases, laughter.

 
    ho will I marry? How long will I live? What’s the winning number? Will this product sell? Will this plane crash? Will we win the war? Everyone from lovestruck teenagers to world leaders wants to know what lies ahead. That’s why divination—the art of foretelling the future—has existed in some form in every culture in recorded history. Today, one can find practitioners of the most popular forms of divination— astrology , tarot card reading, crystal-ball gazing, palm reading, numerology, and tea-leaf reading —in most any city. And these examples are only a tiny sample of hundreds of divinatory systems that have been developed over the centuries.

     
    The hat, robes, wand, and books of the fortune-teller made him instantly recognizable. This seventeenth-century diviner holds an astrolabe to symbolize his knowledge of astrology . ( photo credit 19.1 )
     
    Many methods