Reality Remix #52 -- Putin on the Ritz

Charles1952,

3 a.m.? I wouldn't be able to think straight, and I wouldn't be coherent.

I can pick a few thoughts out of Norman Cohn's book.

His argument is that the great witch-hunt only became possible when various strands came together.

There was the authoritarian power of the Inquisition, which was originally directed against heretics, first the Albigensians and later the Waldensians. These heretics and the Templars were the first targets of the charge of "devil-worship". The "secret orgy" element of the charges is an old fantasy going back to the Roman Empire, when exactly the same charges were made against the Christians of Tertullian's time.

There was a tradition of scholarly ritual "magic" with pagan roots, which is the source of the "conjuring up demons" element. "It seems that the first person to be formally tried for practising ritual magic was Pope Boniface VIII in 1310-11" [posthumously, and for political reasons].

There were folk-anxieties about blood-sucking female night-demons which he traces back to Roman times.

Then there were the peasant fears about their neighbours being able to injure them with malicious magic.

The turning-point in the growth of the witch-hunt was in the fifteenth century when the authorities began taking these fears seriously, because the accused then came under the sway of the inquisition and the "devil-worshipping conspiracy" theory which it had been developing for use on a completely different set of people.

The key point was belief in the ability of witches to fly by night.

Originally, women were being punished for believing that they could do this.

But the authorities were later acting on the assumption that they really did.

This was crucial, as Cohn points out, because only "flying by night" makes it logistically possible for witches to gather together for great night-meetings, and so the entire theory about the "witches' sabbat" rests on that belief. It turns the accused witches from isolated individuals into members of an (imaginary) continent-wide secret society.