Witchcraft Its Power in the World Today by William Seabrook

Foreward: (excerpt)
Exploding a Non Sequitur Perched on the Horns of Dilemma

Although this book may boil and bubble with the dirty doings of modern witches, white and black; with current sorcerers, incantations, human vampires on the Riviera; panther men in Africa and Satanists in Paris; Devil Worshippers in New York; werewolves in Washington Square; witchcraft curses and killings dated 1940 here in the United States-it is going to be a dissapointment to all who believe in the supernatural.

I am addressing it to the rational people only. It is going to show them, if I can, that while witchcraft is not demonic, it is a specific, real, and dangerous force, evil when used for evil, mysterious in some of its manifestations, but always alalyzable, always understandable within the bounds of reason, and compatable in consequence, like crime, snake bite, insanity, and yellow fever.

A thousand books, histories, and treatises were written in the age of superstition, to prove that this deadly snake was a basilisk. Another thousand volumes have been written in our age of so-called reason to prove that since the snake is not a basilisk, it consequently cannot bite you. I am a firm disbeliever in basilisks, but also a disbeliever in nonsequiturs.

1940