Why do song lyrics touch so many hearts? Why do poems speak to our core about an array of emotions? Why are some movies or books so profound to so many?

It is because as human beings we have far more in common than we care to admit. No matter our culture, race, affluence or lack of – we all know what pain feels like, what joy feels like. We have all been loved, we have all been rejected. We have all felt the sting of unfair circumstance or the surreal giddiness of magical serendipity.

We are more one than many on this human path, one we trod together – shoulder to shoulder or connected by some mysterious commonality through the centuries.

This universality of the human experience is one of the reasons I feel so drawn to antiques and why I prefer to be surrounded by the remnants of…

From the earliest times, mythical demons have inhabited all faiths and religions but Christianity really grasped the nettle whole-heartedly, with various writers recording ever-more elaborate inhabitants of Hell and going to great lengths to explain their roles and where specifically they resided. The Spanish Franciscan Catholic Bishop, Alphonso de Spina, recorded in 1467 that demons could be classified in the following ways:

• Demons of fate
• Goblins
• Incubi and succubi
• Wandering groups or armies of demons
• Familiars
• Drudes
• Cambions and other demons that are born from the union of a demon with a human being.
• Liar and mischievous demons
• Demons that attack the saints
• Demons that try to induce old women to attend Witches’ Sabbaths

A hundred years later, Peter Binsfield, a German bishop, honed these vague categories and aligned them to the seven deadly sins, hence, the seven princes of Hell looked like this:

• Lucifer: pride
• Mammon: greed
• Asmodeus: lust
• Leviathan: envy
• Beelzebub: gluttony
• Amon or Satan: wrath
• Belphegor: sloth