Demonology and Devil-lore

A man kills a sacred serpent in Dahomey; the crowd chases him through fire, then stops when he plunges into a river. Why should a snake, a flame and a river belong to one sacred story?

In this late-nineteenth-century inquiry, Moncure Daniel Conway asks us to look back to a time when the sun drove a chariot, stars moved by command, and spirits dwelt in trees and fountains. He suggests that the earliest gods were not divided neatly into powers of good and evil: sun, storm and fire once shared a celestial family. But as people connected these forces with earthly fortune and suffering, harmony gave way to conflict—and old gods could become monsters. How did that change reshape the stories people told about evil, and what traces of the older beliefs survived?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.