“A Delusion of the Learned”

John Raphael Smith, The Weird Sisters (Shakespeare, MacBeth, Act 1, Scene 3), March 10, 1785

At the end of my last post, I wrote: “It has occurred to me lately, in what seems to be an endless season of extreme irrationality, that it might serve us to go back to the Enlightenment, start again fresh, and see if we can do a better job of coming in to the 21st century.”

Now, to be clear, my knowledge of the Enlightenment coming into this venture might fill a thimble. To try and fill at least a bucket’s worth, I have turned to Ritchie Robertson’s book, “The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790.” Robertson makes a subtly intelligent guide, and I am already confident that the book, though I have not yet finished it, has a right to be called “magisterial.” On top of that, it’s also highly readable.

Robertson cautions at the outset that “We should not expect to find in the Enlightenment . . . some early version of the liberal values of the present day; but we can certainly find there the seedbed in which many of these values germinated.” [p. xvii] He cites many references for this proposition. Here’s one I found particularly appealing, in part because it came from Eric Hobsbawm, whom I would have considered an unlikely source:

“I believe that one of the few things that stands between us and an accelerated descent into darkness is the set of values inherited from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This is not a fashionable view at this moment, when the Enlightenment can be dismissed as anything from superficial and intellectually naive to a conspiracy of dead white men in periwigs to provide the intellectual foundation for Western imperialism. It may or may not be all that, but it is also the only foundation for all the aspirations to build societies fit for all human beings to live anywhere on this Earth, and for the assertion and defence of their human rights as persons.” [p. xvi; cite to source]

Illustration of witches, perhaps being tortured before James VI and I, from his Daemonologie (1597)

In his subchapter, “The Witch Craze and Its End,” Robertson writes, “Nothing could more illustrate the dominion of fear over pre-Enlightenment minds than the witch craze, and nothing could be more antithetical to the Enlightenment.” [p. 14] At the same time, he admonishes that “The Enlightenment did not cause the diminution of witch-beliefs; rather, that diminution was among the preconditions which enabled the Enlightenment to emerge.” [p. 14]

Now, Robertson cautions early on that, in examining the Enlightenment, there is a tendency to engage in “‘presentism’—that is, a tendency to see the past only from a present-day perspective . . .”. [p. xvi] I’ll confess, though, that I found “presentism” hard to avoid when reading this passage:

“Historians have wondered why learned inquisitors were so keen not just to accept, but to elaborate hugely, the fantasies of the uneducated. Part of the puzzle is that over the preceding centuries elites had become more, not less, willing to believe in witchcraft. . . . In the later Middle Ages . . . the Church exerted its authority against heretics . . . . The image of the heretic became conflated with that of the witch. Anxiety about witches was increased by the religious divisions that split Christendom soon afterwards. All sides in the Reformation found convenient scapegoats in witches and Jews.” [p. 15]

Jacques de Gheyn II, Witches’ Sabbath late 16th-early 17th C

Robertson continues:

“The myth of the witches’ sabbat was a new element. It is now agreed to be a construction by the inquisitors, incorporating bits of popular superstition and enlarged into a coherent fantasy by the inversion of Christian imagery. More than a popular belief, it was a delusion of the learned. The demonologists, who produced shelves of erudite treatises around 1600, have been claimed as the leading intellectuals of their day, and even reputable scientists. Armed with an unfalsifiable theory, the licence to confirm it by torture, and a conviction that they were Christendom’s last defence against the power of Satan, these intellectuals had, in reality, the destructive effect that their fantasy ascribed to witches.” [pp. 15-16]

Robertson shortly brings the whole catastrophe back to earth:

“The demonologists were responding to an extraordinary situation, though not the one they imagined. From about 1560 onwards, Europe was in the grip not of Satan and his minions, but of the Little Ice Age. . . . Baffled and terrified by what they saw as unnatural weather, people sought an explanation and a scapegoat in the supposed maleficent practices of witches. It has been shown that phases of particularly bad weather coincided with collective panics leading to persecutions.” [p. 16]

ROST FAIR ON THE THAMES IN 1683

So, one might ask, how did this all end? Robertson postulates the following:

“The accumulated evidence may suggest not that people became sceptical about witchcraft, but that an already widespread, though inadmissible, scepticism could eventually be uttered. . . . Even during the great persecutions, how many people really credited the fantasies of the inquisitors? There may have been many people like Arthur Wilson* who did not even commit their scepticism to paper. Similarly, in 1930s Russia, how many really believed that the Old Bolsheviks were directing a vast conspiracy against Stalin?” [pp. 20-21]

*Here is what Wilson, a spectator of a trial of 25 witches at Chelmsford, wrote:

“‘[I] could find nothing in the Evidence that did sway me to thinke them other then poore, mallenchollie Envious, mischievous, ill disposed, ill dieted atrabilious Constitutions’, with over-active ‘fancies working by grosse fumes & vapors,’ but he wisely kept his diagnosis to himself.” [p. 20]

Hannes Bok, The Pampero Witch ( 1941)

To accompany you on your journey through this post, here is Berlioz’s “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath (1830).