Summons to Reason 1558-1649
SUPERSTITION: ARE people poor because they are ignorant, or ignorant because they are poor? It is a question that divides political philosophers between conservatives stressing heredity (inborn inequalities of mental capacity) and reformers relying on environment (the power of education and opportunity).
In societies knowledge grows, and superstition wanes, with the
increase and distribution of wealth. And yet even in a widely prosperous
country, and especially among the harassed poor and the idle rich,
thought has to live in a jungle of superstitions: astrology, numerology,
palmistry, portents, the evil eye, witches, goblins, ghosts, demons, incantations,
exorcisms, dream interpretations, oracles, miracles, quackery,
and occult qualities, curative or injurious, in minerals, plants, and animals.
Consider, then, the intellectual miasma poisoning the roots and wilting the flowers of science in a people whose wealth is scant or centered in a few.
To the poor in body and mind superstition is a treasured element in the poetry of life, gilding dull days with exciting marvels, and redeeming misery with magic powers and mystic hopes.
Sir Thomas Browne, in 1646, required 652 pages to list and briefly treat
the superstitions current in his day.' Nearly all these occultisms flourished
among the Britons under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. In 1597 King
James VI published an authoritative Demonologie, which is one of the
horrors of literature.
He ascribed to witches the power to haunt houses, to make men and women love or hate, to transfer disease from one person to another, to kill by roasting a wax effigy, and to raise devastating storms; and he advocated the death penalty for all witches and magicians, and even for their customers.
When a tempest nearly wrecked him on his return from Denmark with his bride, he caused four suspects to be tortured into confessing that they had plotted to destroy him by magic means; and one of them, John Fain, after the most barbarous torments, was burned to death (1590).
In this matter the Kirk agreed with the King, and lay magistrates lenient
to witches were threatened with excommunication. Between 1560 and
1600 some eight thousand women were burned as witches in a Scotland
having hardly a million souls.
In England the belief in witchcraft was almost universal; learned physicians like William Harvey and Sir Thomas Browne shared it; the hardheaded Elizabeth allowed her laws of 1562 to make witchcraft a capital crime; eighty-one women were executed for it in her reign.
James moderated his fanaticism after passing from VI to I; he insisted on fair trials of the accused, exposed false confessions and accusations, and saved the lives of five women charged by a hysterical boy. The hunt nearly ceased after Charles I, but it was resumed, and reached its height, under the rule of the Long Parliament, when in two years (1645- 47) two hundred "witches" were consumed.
One voice, amid the fury, appealed to reason. Reginald Scot, an Englishman
despite his name, published at London in 1584 The Discoucrie of
Witchcraft, second only to Johann Wier's De praestigiis daemonum (Basel,
1564) in the dangerous attempt to moderate the sadistic superstition.
Scot described the "witches" as poor old women who could harm no one; even if Satan did work through them they were rather to be pitied than to be burned; and to ascribe miracles to these crones was an insult to the miracles of Christ.
He exposed the awful tortures that made witchcraft confessions worthless, the lax irregularity and injustice of trial procedure, the incredibiities gulped down by judges and inquisitors. The book had no effect. In this atmosphere science tried to grow.
P. 162-3 Age of Reason Begins by Will Durant
- French Deism: deistic Humanism, Pantheism
- The English Deists: Introduction
- Is it Unitarianism or Deism?
- Gnosticism Mainpage
- Collection of Gnostic Texts
- Demiurge Creator of the World
- Who are the Cathers?
- Gnostic Terms
- Religious Syncretism
- Radical Reevaluation of Christianity
- Christian Origins Hellenism Gnosticism
- Apostle Paul Enemy of Jesus' Church
- St Augustine Father Protestantism
- Zoroaster Versus Jesus
- Original Sin
- Biblical Monotheism and Persian Influences
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