- Continue Browsing
- Your Basket is Empty
Monday-Sunday 11.00-18.30
19-21 Cecil Ct, London WC2N 4EZ, UK
Tel. 020 7836 2182
Category:
Myth & Folklore
The Devil's Atlas by Edward Brooke-Hitching
£25.00
The Devil's Atlas is an illustrated guide to the heavens, hells and lands of the dead as imagined throughout history by cultures and religions around the world. Packed with colourful maps, paintings and captivating stories, the reader is taken on a compelling tour of the geography, history and supernatural populations of the afterworlds of cultures around the globe.
Whether it's the thirteen heavens of the Aztecs, the Chinese Taoist netherworld of 'hungry ghosts', or the 'Hell of the Flaming Rooster' of Japanese Buddhist mythology (in which sinners are tormented by an enormous fire-breathing cockerel), The Devil's Atlas gathers together a wonderful variety of beliefs and representations of life after death. These afterworlds are illustrated with an unprecedented collection of images, ranging from the marvellous 'infernal cartography' of the European Renaissance artists attempting to map the structured Hell described by Dante and the decorative Islamic depictions of Paradise to the various efforts to map the Garden of Eden and the spiritual vision paintings of nineteenth-century mediums. The Devil's Atlas accompanies beautiful images with a highly readable trove of surprising facts and narratives, from the more inventive torture methods awaiting sinners, to colourful eccentric catalogues of demons, angels and assorted death deities.
A traveller's guide to worlds unseen, The Devil's Atlas is a fascinating study of the boundless capacity of human invention, a visual chronicle of man's hopes, fears and fantasies of what lies beyond.
Whether it's the thirteen heavens of the Aztecs, the Chinese Taoist netherworld of 'hungry ghosts', or the 'Hell of the Flaming Rooster' of Japanese Buddhist mythology (in which sinners are tormented by an enormous fire-breathing cockerel), The Devil's Atlas gathers together a wonderful variety of beliefs and representations of life after death. These afterworlds are illustrated with an unprecedented collection of images, ranging from the marvellous 'infernal cartography' of the European Renaissance artists attempting to map the structured Hell described by Dante and the decorative Islamic depictions of Paradise to the various efforts to map the Garden of Eden and the spiritual vision paintings of nineteenth-century mediums. The Devil's Atlas accompanies beautiful images with a highly readable trove of surprising facts and narratives, from the more inventive torture methods awaiting sinners, to colourful eccentric catalogues of demons, angels and assorted death deities.
A traveller's guide to worlds unseen, The Devil's Atlas is a fascinating study of the boundless capacity of human invention, a visual chronicle of man's hopes, fears and fantasies of what lies beyond.
If you like this, you might also like:
The Slavic Myths by Noah Charney & Svetlana Slapsak
£18.00 £20.00
Pulitzer-nominated author and one of the great public intellectuals of Slavic culture bring to life the unfamiliar myths and legends of the Slavic world. Slavic cultures are far-ranging, comprising of East Slavs (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus), West Slavs (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland) and South Slavs (the countries of former Yugoslavia plus Bulgaria), yet they are connected by tales of adventure and magic with deep roots in a common lore. In this first collection of Slavic myths for an international readership, Noah Charney and Svetlana Slapsak expertly weave together a retelling of the ancient stories with nuanced analysis that illuminates their place at the heart of Slavic tradition.
Though less familiar to us than the legends of ancient Egypt, Greece and Scandinavia, in the world of Slavic mythology we find much that we can recognize: petulant deities, demons and faeries; witches, the sinister vestica, whose magic may harm or heal; a supreme god who can summon storms and hurl thunderbolts. Gods gather under the World Tree, reminiscent of Norse mythology's Yggdrasill; or, after the coming of Christianity, congregate among the clouds. The vampire - usually the only Serbo-Croatian word in any foreign-language dictionary - and the werewolf emerge from the shallow graves of Slavic belief.
In their careful analysis and sensitive reconstructions of the origin stories, Charney and Slapsak unearth the Slavic beliefs before their distortion first by Christian chroniclers and then by 19th-century scholars seeking origin stories for their new-born nation states. They reveal links not only to the neighbouring pantheons of Greece, Rome, Egypt and Scandinavia but also the belief systems of indigenous peoples of Australia, the Americas, Africa and Asia. In so doing, they draw out the universalities that cut across cultures in the stories we tell ourselves.
The Watkins Book of English Folktales by Neil Philip
£13.49 £14.99
This is a golden treasury of over one hundred English folktales captured in the form they were first collected in past centuries. Read these classic tales as they would have been told when storytelling was a living art - when the audience believed in boggarts and hobgoblins, local witches and will-o'-the-wisps, ghosts and giants, cunning foxes and royal frogs. Find "Jack the Giantkiller", "Tom Tit Tot" and other quintessentially English favourites, alongside interesting borrowings, such as an English version of the Grimms' "Little Snow White" - as well as bedtime frighteners, including "Captain Murderer", as told to Charles Dickens by his childhood nurse.
Neil Philip has provided a full introduction and source notes on each story that illustrate each tale's journey from mouth to page, and what has happened to them on the way. These tales rank among the finest English short stories of all time in their richness of metaphor and plot and their great verbal dash and daring.
England on Fire by Stephen Ellcock & Mat Osman
£22.50 £25.00
This is a book about English art like no other. Forget the tired rogues' gallery of lords and ladies, forget the tall ships and haywains. These images cut to the heart of England's psychic landscapes to portray an Albion unhinged, where magic and rebellion and destruction are the horses to which the country is hitched.
On these fabled shores we are all castaways, whether our family has lived here for four thousand years or for four. Here you will find depictions of ancient trackways, chalk carvings and standing stones, of animal-masked community rituals, of streets set ablaze in protest, of occult dreams and psychedelic prophecies. There are over 200 images by artists ranging from William Blake, J.M.W.
Turner and Samuel Palmer to Paul Nash, Louis Wain, Bill Brandt, Derek Jarman and Ithell Colquhoun to present-day visionaries such as Paula Rego, Cathy de Monchaux, George Shaw, Jamie Reid, Matt Collishaw,Tacita Dean, Lina Iris Viktor, Yinka Shonibare, Nick Waplington, Dan Hillier, Nicola Tyson, Sutapa Biswas and Chila Kumari Burman. The mind-blowing selection of images is accompanied by short texts by Mat Osman, exploring magic and mazes, ghosts and gardens, shipwrecks and cities. These poetic renderings of a spectral isle, together with Stephen Ellcock's hallucinatory visual journey, reclaim Albion as an eternally inspiring and anarchic domain - an England on fire.
© 2024 Watkins Books. WATKINS MEDIA LIMITED. COMPANY REGISTRATION NUMBER: 9171151. COMPANY REGISTRATION ADDRESS: SHEPPERTON HOUSE UNIT 11, 89 SHEPPERTON ROAD, LONDON, ENGLAND, N1 3DF.
Close