Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

Witness for the Persecution

But, if the witchcraft trials of early modern Europe were not really a purge of moon‐worshipping midwives by patriarchal Catholic inquisitors, how did they ever come about?

In Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay describes a typical manifestation of witches in the South of France:

All the witches confessed that they had been present at the great Domdaniel, or Sabbath. At these Saturnalia, the devil sat upon a large gilded throne, sometimes in the form of a goat; sometimes as a gentleman, dressed all in black, with boots, spurs, and sword; and very often as a shapeless mass, resembling the trunk of a blasted tree, seen indistinctly among the darkness. They generally proceeded to the Domdaniel, riding on spits, pitchforks, or broomsticks, and on their arrival indulged with the fiends in every species of debauchery.

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But how could all the witches have concurred in such extraordinary detail? Why, at a traffic accident, one can hardly get three witnesses to agree to what happened. One swears he saw nothing, while the other two will tell you tales as far apart as the innards of their wrecked cars are scattered. But here, the witches all see the same things, down to the finest detail.

Our instincts tell us they could not have. And, indeed, they did not. What the witches are repeating, Mackay tells us, was simply what the pundits of the time were reading.

Mackay goes on:

Grave and learned doctors of divinity openly sustained ...