THE COMPLETE BOOK OF VOODOO

It would be nice to be able to dismiss this as just another innocuous instance of the current occult revival. And the book, looking like a homely how-to and sounding for the most part like those sub-sectarian pamphlets you're handed on streetcorners, seems expressly designed to slip by in this guise and cash in on the ""enlightenment"" of the young. It represents a degree of cynicism one doesn't expect from a major publisher, even in a period of potboilers and tight money, for the rituals it spells out are gruesomely sadistic, many are death hexes as if this were perfectly legitimate, and all are urged with the assurance that ""what other religions merely promise, voodoo delivers in fact."" Occasional sleazy pretensions to historical or anthropological objectivity do not really try to disguise the tact that this is a manual of practice. They are not practices that anyone would like to see encouraged, particularly given the susceptibility of some circles to this brand of enlightenment.