Description: How widespread belief in fortune-telling, prophecies, spirits, magic, and protective talismans gripped the battlefields and home fronts of Europe during the First World War.
Review Quotes: "Owen Davies notes that great conflicts invariably generate an upsurge of belief in the mystical, visionary and occult. In A Supernatural War Davies surveys, in remarkable detail, the range of such beliefs, from cheap pamphlets prophesying the coming war to the legend of the medieval archers known as the Angels of Mons to the lucky charms worn by Italian soldiers."--Michael Dirda, Washington Post
"This is another wonderful book from the leading expert in the history of magic between 1740 and 1940. Readers will never look at the First World War in the same way again."--Ronald Hutton, author of The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft"Davies has delved into the sources and emerged with an interesting conclusion: World War I did not increase public interest in the para-rational, as some historians have held, but only gave it a new and horrible context." -- Shepherd Express"Well-documented with deep investigation into newspapers and magazines of the period, accounts by military veterans and chroniclers, and primary sources in German and French, Davies' work provides readers with an array of fervent reactions to the onslaught of mass warfare." -- Pop Matters
"Owen Davies' A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination, and Faith during the First World War is a valuable contribution to the growing scholarship on religion, science, and magic that examines these discourses from the early modern period through the present day." -- Patrick J. D'Silva, Reading Religion