Nixon was "locked in a titanic battle between hope and fear," between his "light side" and "dark side" and "struggled, bravely if not always wisely, against the dark." And this battle took place in the very public square.
Keith Thomas cited the case of a 14th century magician found carrying around the decapitated head of a Saracen that he had procured in Spain, ‘within which he proposed to enclose a spirit that would answer his questions’).11 All this is followed by the construction of a magic circle and the summoning of ‘Emperor Lucifer’ to appear ‘by the name of the great living God, his dear son and the Holy Ghost and by the power of Adonai, Elohim’, etc. The book then descends into a number of rituals involving further animal sacrifice, including boiling a cat, cutting the throat of a young wolf, and decapitating a frog, elements that render it one of the baser grimoires and a true book of sorcery with roots in primitive shamanism. (Needless to say, its prime value lies in an anthropological history of ideas within cultural context, not as an instruction manual—although that said, it did in fact become a source of working material for some forms of Caribbean sorcery).
9 Universal Darwinism: Natural Theology as an Evolutionary Outcome? 247
Like most other humans, Nixon was a complex person, however unlike most other people, he was under the presidential spotlight. This complexity was seamlessly narrated by Thomas's accounting of a variety of Nixon anecdotes, both good and bad. Nixon was "locked in a titanic battle between hope and fear," between his "light side" and "dark side" and "struggled, bravely if not always wisely, against the dark." And this battle took place in the very public square.