Books like John Dee and the empire of angels by Jason Louv

An insightful examination of how witchcraft, astrology, and popular magic shaped English society during the 16th and 17th centuries amid the Protestant Reformation and the rise of scientific thought.

On May 21, 1991, popular University of Chicago Divinity School Professor Ioan Culianu was murdered execution-style on campus. The crime stunned the school, terrified students, and mystified the FBI. The case remains unsolved. In Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu, Ted Anton pieces together the evidence and shows that the murder is in fact what Culianu's friends suspected all along: the first political assassination of a professor on American soil. This book traces Culianu's life from his privileged childhood in Romania, through his days at the University of Bucharest, where he first encountered the methods of Securitate surveillance, to his time at the University of Chicago, where, as a handpicked successor to Mircea Eliade, he was becoming a renowned scholar in his own right. Anton shows how Culianu - an expert on magic and the occult whose predications were often remarkabley accurate - began toying with a new far-right coalition in Romania, taunting them from the presumed safety of his American base with the content and tone of his articles, goading them into believing him dangerous. Besides shedding new light on the murder, this book offers a fascinating introduction to Romanian politics in the aftermath of the 1989 revolution and to the relation of ideas to power in current history, as well as to the exotic and mystical ideas of a brilliant man.

Anthony F. Aveni explores how magic, mysticism, and occult practices have shaped human understanding from ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary culture, revealing the enduring link between belief and the quest for meaning.

A concise, accessible survey tracing the history of magic and the occult from ancient Egypt through Renaissance figures to modern Wicca and popular culture.

De Borah Harkness examines John Dee’s famed angelic conversations, revealing how they shaped his natural philosophy and reflected the religious and scientific currents of early‑modern England.

Claude Lecouteux offers a scholarly examination of the surviving grimoires that once guided European mystics, charting their historical evolution, occult practices, and cultural impact from medieval France to modern times.