ABSTRACT The animacy of plants stands in the neglected posthuman borderland between the “turn to animals” and the “turn to things.” Situated on an “animacy hierarchy” betwixt and between animals and things, plants are perhaps more involved in human acts of placemaking than animals. But no plants are more “animate” than the creepers, climbers, and twiners whose uncanny animacy so fascinated Darwin that he kept such a vine in his study to study its movements. In ecogothic contexts, plants move from passive markers of setting (the ecogothic uses creepers like ivy to demarcate the hauntable space of the gothic ruin) to becoming active participants in the unfolding drama, serving as antagonists to the intrepid human explorer in the imperial ecogothic, to serving in the conventional role of poltergeists in the haunted house narrative, to finally becoming active agents of murder in botanical horror.

ABSTRACT On 20 June 1696, the magician John Ellis signed a contract with the St Albans physician, mystic, and meteorologist Gustavus Parker promising to teach Parker about ritual magic. Failure to do so, Ellis agreed, would lead to his departure for hell for all eternity. The following year, the two men signed another contract with similar yet stricter terms. Both documents, now collected in Lansdowne 846, offer a window into the ideals and praxis of the transmission of ritual magic, the significance of spirit summoning in said praxis, and the impact of legal restrictions on service magicians in early modern Britain.

ABSTRACT Even as the Valois and Bourbon kings rationalized the institutions of absolute rule, the majority of their subjects continued to participate in a shared culture of magic that was tightly entwined with religious faith. Privileged and underprivileged alike maintained that sacred and supernatural forces could, and did, intervene in the natural world. This article seeks to explore some of the key ways in which those beliefs functioned within the judicial arena. It will contend that France’s highly regarded judicial system was effective because it instrumentalized such understandings. The article will examine the magico-religious powers accorded the central figures in the judicial system—the magistrate, the executioner, and the criminal—and argue that beliefs about the supernatural and the sacred made operative the most prestigious criminal courts of early modern France, and in so doing, enhanced the power of the absolutist state.

ABSTRACT For the late-Victorian folklorist Andrew Lang, credulous interest in the supernatural could coexist with a distinctly modern emphasis on scientific empiricism. He believed that his society, despite its sophistication and refinement, was less different than it claimed from its distant past. This article argues that for Lang stories of ghosts were still relevant even in an age dominated by scientific inquiry and that he justified the use of modern empirical methods to study supernatural phenomena. In advocating for analytical investigation, he yearned to justify the study of ghosts for a doubtful world, to make it relevant and credible to the present age. Still, examining Lang’s article “Ghosts Up to Date” reveals his attitude toward the evidence-based exploration of the paranormal to be ambivalent, as he attempts to reconcile a fin-de-siècle desire for progress with the folklorist’s yearning to maintain a connection to the past.

ABSTRACT Through stories and storytelling, this article tells of how a popular Tamil goddess, Veeramakaliamman, is birthed, bodied, placed, and propelled across time and space. Four narratives—derived from ethnographic fieldwork, historic and journalistic accounts, folk narratives, and personal memories—present Veeramakaliamman’s origins in the Tamil Nadu district of Pudukkottai as well as charting her growth, travel, and eventual overseas settlement in Singapore. Ongoing interactions between shifting politico-economic conditions and religious sensibilities frame transformations, not just to ritual cults and deities’ natures and powers, but also to their stories. Mapped through shifts in narrative genres is the gentrification of the goddess from a specific, local, and idiosyncratic being into a universal, abstract, and generic force. Deification has transformed an originally sovereign, incendiary, agentic force into a comparatively more contingent, serene, and human-mediated entity. While stories about her still proliferate, the goddess no longer drives her own narrative. Even while inspiring human actions, Veeramakaliamman herself has become more abstract and inert.