Violet M. Firth (Dion Fortune)

Desperate and wretched after the death of his wife at the hands of her lover, Hugh Paston becomes engrossed in the occult and goes on a quest for Pan, aided by an old bookseller called Jelkes. In order to fulfil his desire he buys an old monastery to convert into a temple for Pan. The monastery is haunted however by the spirit of a fifteenth century prior who was walled up for his pagan beliefs and who is also searching for the goat-foot god and seems to possess Paston who begins to wonder if the spirit is not actually the restimulation of a previous incarnation memory of his own. The key to the increasingly complex mystery is held by Mona Freeman whose awakening magical abilities bring success in a moving ritual climax in an old pagan shrine. In esoteric terms it is Dion Fortune's fictional representation of inner powers relating to the Qabalistic sphere of Malkuth – the Sephirah pertaining to Earth.

Dion Fortune's Mystical Qabalah remains a classic in the field. She explores all aspects of the Qabalah-whose disciplines include the esoteric sciences of astrology and tarot, and forms the basis of the Western Mystery Tradition. Her thorough explanation of the Tree of Life, which lies at the heart of Qabalistic teaching, provides a key to the practical working of this mystical system for both novice and initiate. This revised edition includes an additional chapter culled from Fortune's Inner Light Journal describing the paths on the Tree, an editorial update for contemporary readers, and an easy-to-use foldout containing important diagrams that augment study of the text.

Veronica, the young innocent heroine of The Demon Lover, is lured into the clutches of Mr. Lucas under the pretence of being employed as his secretary. She soon becomes unwittingly involved in the dealings of a mysterious and sinister male-only magical Lodge. Despite her psychic capability being ruthlessly exploited by Lucas she falls for him and so becomes embroiled in his occult practices, the vehicle for his misplaced ambition. In a vain attempt to protect her from the wrath of the negative Lodge, Lucas is sucked ever deeper into a chaotic Underworld, desperately wrestling to be free of the hellish Self-created ordeals he has engineered for himself.

The lonely moor, the hapless human being, the mournful blood-freezing howl that presages the approach of the dark beast, the great hound's appearance, black as sin, with eyes like hot coals and jaws slavering to close on the pulsing throat: as Michel Parry says, the scene strikes a primordial chord deep within our racial memory - as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle well knew, when he made this scene central to the ever-popular Hound of the Baskervilles. The perennial fascination of the terrible confrontation between hound and human is reflected in the sixteen excellent stories brought together here, stories of diverse dogs with but one thing in common: their bite is very much worse than their bark. There are dogs in this collection that are creatures of pure evil, and there are dogs which are the terrible instrument of vengeance. There are dogs, too, whose loyalty survives the centuries, notably in the collection's most chilling tale, by that master of the occult, H. P. Lovecraft. Not all the tales are terrifying. Saki (H. H. Munro), for instance, deploys a wickedly satirical humour, and there's an element of pure magic in Fritz Leiber's tale. Again Agatha Christie's contribution has a decidedly Science Fiction connotation. It all adds up to a splendidly varied collection.

Down on his luck, Ted Murchison invokes the Winged Bull, a god of ancient Babylon, to come to his aid. Immediately, he is drawn into a vortex of weird events in which he is asked to rescue the daughter of an old friend from the clutches of a black magician.