In this sweeping, syncretic account of ancient winter rites, Pringle and Urann trace Christmas’s pagan inheritance with anthropological exuberance, where mistletoe is deadly, boars are solar, and the sun’s return is a matter of mythic urgency. Long before the birth of Christ, Yule was already ablaze with light, feasting, and the longing for resurrection.

In this chilling chronicle of collective delusion, Charles Mackay unpacks the dark grip of witchcraft hysteria on early modern Europe, where fear masqueraded as faith and thousands perished beneath the weight of spectral evidence. The essay is less an account of isolated trials than a study in the tragic elasticity of mass belief.

Yule-tide in England evolved from Druidic ritual and Celtic mirth into centuries of roaring fires, wassail bowls, and lavish feasts that reached their zenith in the Tudor and Stuart courts, where mistletoe, mummers, and the boar’s head held symbolic sway. Though later tempered by Puritan austerity and modern restraint, England’s Christmas traditions remain steeped in a history of communal revelry, spiritual observance, and enduring seasonal superstition.

In Christmastide Customs, Bertha F. Herrick traces the rich tapestry of Christmas traditions across time and cultures, from Druidic rites and Bavarian superstitions to the English Lord of Misrule and the legends of Bethlehem. Blending folklore and ceremony, the piece reflects a nostalgic fascination with the sacred and strange roots of the holiday season.

In Christmas Eve and the Twelve Days, Clement A. Miles explores the supernatural richness and folkloric complexity of the holiday season, where saints and spirits, pagan remnants, and Christian rites mingle in a charged atmosphere of wonder and dread. From German Christkind figures and Slavic carols to Scandinavian trolls and Greek Kallikantzaroi, the Twelve Days emerge as a liminal time when the sacred and uncanny draw unusually close.

In this wide-ranging and slyly erudite essay, Andrew Lang dissects the art of literary forgery with more amusement than outrage, revealing a long tradition of hoaxes that blur the line between scholarship and charade. From Onomacritus to Ireland, Lang draws out the comic futility of chasing authenticity in a world where erudition and credulity so often walk hand in hand.

A toast is drunk to the memory of the departed. The men sit about the fireplace smoking or weaving baskets; the women apart, knitting or spinning by the light of the fire and one candle. The children play with their gifts of apples and nuts. As the hour grows later, and mysterious noises begin to be heard about the house, and a curtain sways in a draught, the thoughts of the company already centred upon the dead find expression in words, and each has a tale to tell of an adventure with some friend or enemy who has died.

Drawing on Highland lore and Druidic remnants, W. H. Davenport Adams’s account of Scottish Halloween customs reveals a twilight world where apples predict love, fire wards off famine, and the veil between past and present grows disconcertingly thin. It is not merely a catalogue of superstition, but a meditation on how cultural memory clings to ritual long after belief has faded.

An eccentric omnibus of sacred marvels and architectural oddities, Platts’s chapter leaps from Scottish battlements to Spanish palaces, Swiss hermitages, and Chinese fortifications with the gleeful conviction that wonder alone is evidence enough. Less concerned with chronology than spectacle, it captures the 19th-century impulse to collect the world’s grandeur like postcards.

In this richly layered account, Breen traces the psychoactive journeys of 17th-century English merchants and natural philosophers as they encounter cannabis in South Asia, not as a colonial commodity, but as a marvel both alluring and epistemologically unruly. Through Bowrey’s hallucinatory experiments and Hooke’s stilted lectures, we glimpse an early modern world where science, intoxication, and empire all struggled to contain the “occult” logic of the plant.

In this densely embroidered chronicle of midwinter rites, Charles Hardwick traces the roots of Yuletide and New Year custom, from wassail bowls and yule logs to pantomimes and prophetic mists, revealing a layered tapestry where Christian celebration interweaves with pagan fire-worship and Victorian social aspiration.

Clement A. Miles moves fluently between wassail bowls and boar-shaped loaves, herring salads and sacrificial cats, assembling a vivid ethnography of European Christmases where feasting and folk play linger as half-forgotten rites. At once meticulous and mythopoeic, he invites us to taste the sacred in the sugared, and to see in roast pigs and honeyed wafers the ghost of gods once fed.

This work traces the towering figure of collective revolt from Erasmus Darwin’s sleeping giant to Mary Shelley’s electrified monster, assembling a visual and literary genealogy in which revolution, like Frankenstein’s creature, is both miraculous and horrifying. Through poetry, caricature, and political myth, the essay maps how revolutionary embodiment shifts, from sublime symbol to grotesque cautionary tale.

Crabb examines how mass printing and popular paranoia fused in early modern England to produce the enduring image of the witch as crone: a figure born not just from theology or law, but from ink, wood, and gossip. As cheap pamphlets and reused woodcuts spread tales of scandal, sorcery, and satanic mischief, a visual archetype emerged.

Ruth Edna Kelley traces the global echoes of All Hallows' Eve, from the ghost-lit canals of Japan to the flower-strewn graves of Italy, Spain, and Germany. With lore of djinns, dragon gods, mourning bells, and straw boats for spirits, this chapter reveals how cultures across continents mark the season of the dead with reverence, poetry, and enduring superstition.

In Italy on the night of All Souls', the spirits of the dead are thought to be abroad. In Naples the skeletons in the funeral vaults are dressed up, and the place visited on All Souls' Day. In Salerno before the people go to the all-night service at church they set out a banquet for the dead. If any food is left in the morning, evil is in store for the house.

Ruth Edna Kelley explores the deep-rooted rituals and beliefs of the ancient Celts, whose seasonal festivals and spirit-laden landscapes laid the foundation for Halloween. From Druidic rites in oak groves to Baal-fires lit on pastoral hillsides, Kelley unpacks a world where sun gods, prophetic dreams, and animal-shaped souls intersected with the rhythms of the year.