The Biography of Satan

Graves was born in Brownsville, PA. His parents were Quakers, and as a young man, he followed in their footsteps, eventually shifting to the Hicksite branch of Quakerism. According to one source, Graves did not attend school for more than three or four months of his life, but another source claims that he had a "academical education" and began teaching at a Richmond school at the age of 19, a career he would continue for more than twenty years. He advocated for Abolitionism, was interested in language reform, and became linked with a number of radical freethinkers within Quakerism. In August 1844, he joined a group of roughly fifty utopian settlers from Wayne County, Indiana. Graves married Lydia Michiner, a Quaker, in July 1845 at Goschen Meeting House in Zanesfield, Logan County, Ohio, and the couple raised five children in Harveysburg, Ohio. They then returned to Richmond and purchased a farm. The Goschen Meeting House was a Congregational Friends center dedicated to Temperance and Peace, health reform, anti-slavery, women's rights, and socialistic utopianism. Graves' Quaker upbringing conditioned him to believe in the idea of the Inner Light, which held that all clergy, creeds, and prescribed liturgy in worship were irrelevant and impediments to God's mission. This was exacerbated by Hicks' version of Quakerism, Quietism, in which an individual's spiritual life was paramount and all outward manifestations were invalid.

Though his work has been discredited in some of its details, the atheistic writings and freethinking philosophies of American spiritualist KERSEY GRAVES (1813-1883) remain vital reading today for the more informed critiques of Christianity that they inspired. In this daring book, first published in 1880, Graves condemns the brutal Christian doctrine of eternal punishment through revealing the pagan origins of such concepts as the bottomless pit, lakes of fire and brimstone, the casting out of devils, and other foundational aspects of Christian belief. Students of comparative mythology, modern freethinkers, and anyone interested in demonic folklore will find this Victorian curio an intriguing exposition of ancient folklore. ALSO AVAILABLE FROM COSIMO: Graves's The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors and The Bible of Bibles