Tellingly, as the hysteria spiralled out of control, the girls' power craze meant they finally overstepped themselves and accused the governor's wife of witchcraft - an unwise move. When writs were issued for slander, the girls fled. Their `possession' was miraculously over.
Lessons about persecution and injustice were not well learnt: the succeeding centuries saw countless lynchings of poor blacks,' while America in the twentieth century suffered the McCarthyite antiCommunist `witch- hunts' and the later epidemic of accusations of satanic ritual abuse, mainly by fundamentalist Christian social workers. Arthur Miller's classic play The Crucible (1953), while outwardly about the Salem witch hysteria, is in fact an allegory for the McCarthyite House Committee on Un-American Activities.'
We have seen what a similar hysteria - mass craziness - did to Europe as the Inquisitors' eagerness to exterminate witches wiped out whole communities, especially in France and Germany. However, the Devil need not be invoked as such: Hitler persuaded most ordinary German citizens that all Jews were evil and that any indignity and horror could be inflicted on them because they were not human. Yet lesser-known contagions are often more instructive about the extraordinary capacity decent folk have for being blinded - almost literally - by an idea that provokes hysteria.
During the Second World War bomb-maddened and half-starved British folk often turned on any strangers in the neighbourhood, believing them to be Nazi spies, with a viciousness that their decent pre-war selves would never have believed possible. Occasionally, however, a kind of madness overrode even their persecution of strangers: on one occasion in remote East Anglia, the mob turned on a man who far from being a new face in the area was actually one of them, a neighbour known well to them all. Happening to be out on a Home Guard patrol, he was seized, roughed up, and, despite his desperate and bewildered protestation that he was their long-time neighbour, shot dead. He had spoken to the crowd, reminded them of his identity, and even shown them his papers, but they were so possessed by bloodlust that they literally could not see him as he was. The next day when the red rage had ebbed away, the people were stunned by the fact of a very familiar but very dead man, and the bewildered grief of his traumatized family. No one had any way of explaining what had happened .9
The last major fling of the English witch-hunters took place in the seventeenth century, as Elizabeth I's successor, James I (1566-1625)1° spread his own fear - amounting to a phobia - of witches through a land already raw with religious division, plotting and paranoia. His predecessor, while mouthing platitudes about individual consciences, had made it impossible for Catholics to worship legally in her kingdom, and resentment grew among them exponentially. Known as `the wisest fool in Christendom' (although even that remarkably back-handed compliment is debatable), James had survived the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 when he and his Parliament were targeted by a group of Catholic fanatics, which merely added fuel to the fires of religious intolerance and a heightened atmosphere of suspicion.
Even before Guy Fawkes and his co-religionists attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament,' James had published his Daemonologie (1597), providing zealous witch-hunters with plentiful ammunition. In the book, the narrator Epistemon explains what categories of `unlawful charms, without natural causes' are to be considered witchcraft:
I mean by such kind of charms as commonly daft wives use, for healing of forspoken [bewitched] goods, for preserving them from evil eyes, by knitting ... sundry kinds of herbs to the hair of the goods; by curing the worm, by stemming the blood, by healing of horse-crooks ... or doing such like innumerable things by words, without applying anything meet to the part offended, as mediciners do.
This was a licence to persecute herbalists and traditional healers - be they efficacious or basically harmless, continuing the ancient traditions of folklore. Even if the healer's aim was only to do good, it was still witchcraft. (Many fundamentalist Christians take much the same view about healers today - unless they are of the same persuasion.) Yet what were the poor folk to do in an age when toothache could kill and `official' medicine was not only often worse than useless but also expensive, and the local wise woman with her mysterious jars of herbs might just provide some relief?
Under James, witches were everywhere, like the later `Reds under the bed' hysteria of twentieth-century America. The king himself took an active interest in the major cases, even participating in a number of the trials. Not surprisingly with this unofficial royal warrant, the courts were soon full of wall-eyed, deformed and senile old women on their way to the gallows.
In Scotland, the witch mania saw women at Forres bent double into barrels filled with tar, rolled down Cluny Hill and set alight at the bottom. This would have particularly satisfied James, who was convinced he had been cursed by witches during a visit to Forres in 1600. Having fallen ill while in the neighbourhood he had the area searched: a coven was found in the very act of melting a wax image of the monarch. (Somewhat suspiciously perfect timing.) They were tried and rolled down the hill to their deaths. Of course it is perfectly possible that people were trying to kill James with any means at their disposal - including the `sympathetic magic' of stabbing his image - but whether or not that made them witches or merely desperate to get rid of him must remain open to question.
As his reign progressed, James abandoned his belief in the supernatural abilities of witches, but persisted in seeing them as anti-social elements with subversive potential. Ordinary folk were slower to strip witches of their powers. For, as H. T. F. Rhodes notes in his The Satanic Mass (1954):
Witchcraft was not thought less a social and theological danger with the change of religion in Europe [i.e. from Catholic to Protestant]. It is a singular fact that opinions and beliefs concerning it became even less critical.12
The Jacobean playwright and cleric Thomas Heywood described in his Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels (1635)
ceremonies of the Sabbat where in the worshippers renounce Faith, Baptism and Eucharist, acknowledge Lucifer, and worship him with 'contrarie' rites and ceremonies. To this he adds an original piece of embroiderie of his own by reporting that the witches worship their God standing upon their heads.'
The contemporary Duke of Newcastle echoed the contradictory nature of the general attitude to witches in a conversation recorded by his servant Hobbes:
To which my Lord answered, That though for his part he cared not whether there were witches or no; yet his opinion was That the Confession of Witches, and their sufferings for it proceeded from an erroneous belief, viz, That they had made a contract with the Devil to serve him for such Rewards as were in his power to give them; and that it was their Religion to worship and adore him; in which Religion they had such firm and constant belief, that if anything came to pass according to their desire, they believed the Devil had heard their prayers, and granted their requests, for which they gave him thanks; but if things fell out contrary to their prayers and desires, then they were troubled at it, fearing that they had offended him, and not served him as they ought, and asked for forgiveness of their offences. Also (said my Lord) they imagine their dreams are real exterior actions; for example, if they dream they flye in the Air, or out of the Chimney top, or that they are turned into several shapes, they believe no otherwise, but that it is really so. And this wicked opinion makes them industrious to perform such Ceremonies to the Devil that they may worship him as their God, and chuse to live and dye with him.14
Hobbes may pour scorn on the poor deluded Devil-worshippers who thanked their god if things went right for them but were troubled and wondered how they offended him if matters took a bad turn, but it could equally be an accurate description about how many Christians actually view their own relationship with God, even today.
If the coming age of the true Lucifer means the western world was flooded with light, then - apart from the usual horrors of war and pestilence - there must have been attempts to harness and celebrate the opposite, the mentally and spiritually befogging darkness of Satan. While it is true that the Inquisition continued its satanic depredations on freedom of thought and spirit, there were those who sought to enter into a more immediate and intimate relationship with the Lord of Hell.
Of course, as we have seen, both the Cathars and the Knights Templar had been accused of being Satanists, but as the centuries progressed groups and individuals emerged from the shadows whose entire raison d'etre was not merely to indulge in what outsiders would consider dubious and weird rites, but explicitly to worship the Evil One. Many of these Satanists were claimed by one writer to have been priests - some defrocked - but a high proportion simply worked secretly for the opposition.
One of the commonest of their dark rituals was the parodying of the Mass, with the intention of destroying a living person. As H. C. Lea noted in Materials Towards A History of Witchcraft (1939):
