Never draw pentagrams in the bathroom

The Satanists. Ed. Peter Haining (Taplinger, $5.95). The Complete Book of Magic and Witchcraft. Kathryn Paulsen (Signet, 95¢). Practical Candle Burning. Raymond Buckland (Llewellyn, no price). Diary of a Witch. Sybil Leek (Signet, 75¢). Master Guide to Psychism. Harriet A. Boswell (Lancer, 95¢). Here, Mr. Splitfoot. Robert Somerlott (Viking, $7.50)

Evil is dead. Split reason from emotion, Good from Evil; empty out your own experience, abandon it; convince yourself that Evil has a substantive, Manichean existence, that real excitement, real romance, real intensity, real pleasure, are always elsewhere. The literature of Evil and Satanism is a literature of alienation.

In Peter Haining's The Satanists there are: “evil and perversion … creeping insidiousness … a growing evil … bestial … debase … in the most sickening ways … barbaric acts … notorious … their dark secrets … known perverts … dance abandonedly in the nude … diabolical acts of sacrilege … terrible rituals … the ultimate in degeneracy …” (pp. 14–18). What a wonderful promise!

Good and evil, reason and emotion, deferred gratification and the immediate moment – the splits we make in our experience try to heal themselves while we go on acting as if they existed. Satanism is an essentialism. In this stale but hopeful mental underground Alice Kyteler is still a witch (Montague Summers, undated), “Jewish sorcerers” ride again, and the Goddess of Reason is “adored by the Revolutionaries and Parisian satanists.” Somebody, somewhere, is having a really jolly wicked time.

Like other essentialists, Haining is allergic to history – almost nothing in the collection is dated because, of course, it did not happen : it is always happening. We are dealing with Sacred Time. the undated, unsupported garbage of the two Introductions leads to a conventional collection of horror stories, with two science-fictional specimens (paranoid rather than Satanist). None is as good as Arthur Machen at his best, or as personal, but there is the same beglamored sexuality, the same abundance of the gross or unclean (toads, flies, fat flesh – often linked to male homosexuality), the same archaic literalism, the same simple-minded religion, the same delight in the archaic and exotic – in short, the return of the repressed.