The Black Arts

London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967. First Edition, First Impression. Hardcover. Near Fine in Near Fine Unclipped Dustjacket. First Edition, First Impression. Hardcover. Richard Cavendish (12 August 1930 – 21 October 2016) was a British historian who was considered Britain's foremost authority on the subjects of occultism. Cavendish, was an authority on magic, myth and witchcraft whose bestseller The Black Arts caught the imagination of spiritual questers at the tail end of the 1960s. Cavendish became the founding editor of Man, Myth & Magic, which began as a British weekly magazine in 1970 and ran for 112 issues, exploring witchcraft, black magic and the tarot alongside legends, myths and religious beliefs. A quote from the book: “The driving force behind black magic is hunger for power,” and the last sentence of that paragraph being “Carried to its furthest extreme, the black magician’s ambition is to wield extreme power over the entire universe, to make himself a god.” A classic scholarly book on the occult. Light shelf/edge wear, small mark on ep, else tight, bright, and unmarred, few chips to dust jacket. Black cloth with gilt titles to spine. 8vo. 373pp. Illus. (b/w).