PSYCHOLOGY OF THE WITCH CRAZE

The nature of evil; horror fiction; heuristics; demons; witchcraft; natural disasters; aliens; monsters

Apr 10, 2024

This is Europe, in the period historians call the Early Modern. They mean the era from about 1500 to 1800, when cracks were appearing on the surface of the medieval world. Isolated, agricultural communities were becoming less isolated, and less agricultural. Then as now people debated the roles of church and state (one was on the decline just as the other was on the rise). Then as now everyone gave lip-service to Peace but required an Enemy. Then as now there was the problem of crime.

Theologians were more active and powerful than they are today. They were in the midst of a somewhat-frantic quest to prove that God was good, the Bible true, and Satan real. There were two reasons for this. The first was the threat to their power of the nation-state itself. The second was a genuine, consuming terror that, in the battle between good and evil, good was losing.

They used every tool they could: logic, rhetoric, intimidation, even torture. The entire planet seemed to them the theatre of epic, endless battles between good and evil. Who could doubt it? The existence of crime was all the proof you needed. Demons were all about, tempting, seducing, defiling. But something was coming that would make them vanish almost completely. It would replace the older systems of thought that created demons in the first place. Here is something about those older systems:

The quote comes from a book called Before Philosophy.[i] It is a very straightforward title. The book tells how people used to explain the universe, hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Human beings have a need to understand the causes of things. It seems almost as powerful as the need to breathe. The quote above reminds us that we used to look ‘not for the how, but the who’. At one time, then, to explain an event was the same as saying who was responsible for it. Why was there a drought? Because rain itself refused to fall. Why did crops fail? Because a witch cursed them.

This attitude can be difficult for twenty-first century people like you and me to grasp. An illustration may help. Horror films and crime films have at least one element in common: both contain a source of evil. It usually takes the form of a more or less recognisable ‘villain’. Horror films are simpler in at least one respect. Their villains need no motivation.

Let’s take as an example two films about demons: William Friedkin’s The Exorcist and M Night Shyamalan’s Devil. You may not have seen both, or either, but that doesn’t matter. They share a single fundamental idea: A demon enters our humdrum, everyday world and manufactures all kinds of eye-pleasing mayhem. What is the demon’s motivation? We are not told. The directors don’t find it necessary to ask. Neither does the audience. We need no explanation for the spinning heads, the hangings, or the projectile vomiting. It’s enough to know that we are watching demons at work. Demons just do things like that. The demon needs no why, because the demon is a who. Crime films are different in so far as the criminal needs a why. Acgtors, like police officers, refer to characters’ motivation.

In fact, The Exorcist is unusual because, unlike most horror films, it tells a tale from an explicitly Christian perspective. The film is about a priest whose wavering faith is restored when he comes eye-to-bloodshot-eye with a demon. If evil is at large in the universe, he reasons, surely goodness is, too. If evil evidently takes the shape of a demon, Goodness surely takes the shape of God. Bear the priest’s logic in mind as our story progresses.

One real-life example will make the point again. William Tompson of Dartmouth was a luckless Early Modern sailor whose ship caught fire at sea. Rescued, he was dragged to Spain and thrown into prison for a year. Tompson blamed a woman named Alice Trevisard, a witch who had once cursed him, saying, ‘Thou shalt be better thou hadst never met with me!’ Tompson, like the audience at a horror film, looked not for a why but a who. Alice Trevisard was to blame, and that was enough.[ii]

Imagine that you and I were compelled, for some unsavoury reason, to dig up a corpse. Imagine, too, that we were surprised to discover its flesh in globs and tatters. We might ask why. Being modern people, we would look for a modern, scientific explanation: something to do with micro-organisms, perhaps. Early Modern people, though, would have asked who was responsible. Their minds would turn to ghouls or Nachzehrers.[1] Such legendary creatures probably had their origins in stories told by grave robbers.[iii]

Entities that have a purpose are called agents. When psychologists use them to explain things, they use the term agenticity.[iv] One infamous fault in human thinking follows as a consequence. Psychologists call it promiscuous teleology (PT). Teleology means the study of purpose. When we reason as if an inanimate object is an agent with a purpose, we are being ‘promiscuously teleological’. We all do it more often than we realise.

You may well have heard perfectly-reasonable adults explain that a bees fly around the garden ‘in order to pollinate the flowers’, or that rain falls ‘in order to make plants grow’. Both statements are false. Bees and rain have no more purpose than rocks. Have you ever said, ‘My car had to break down on the day of that important meeting’, or ‘This printer wants to annoy me’? That’s PT again.

My colleague, Ronan Mills, and I discovered in our research that human beings are forever transforming objects into agents that intend to exasperate, perplex, or (occasionally) gratify us. The fact that we do it even today, in our own scientific age, shows just how powerful the impulse is, and how forgiving we should be of our ancestors who did it too.[v]

Once we appreciate the role of agenticity and PT in Early Modern thought, everything that follows, no matter how bizarre, has its own predictable logic.

When something unlucky happens, or something disastrous, agenticity becomes particularly seductive. As one professor of law has it, ‘one of our few reliable weapons at moments when events spin out of control is to work out who’s to blame’.[vi] In many parts of the world, people start talking about ‘evil magic’. On Dobu, (a group of islands near New Guinea,) people have no concept of misfortune. When anything goes wrong, they just blame witches.[vii]

One nasty example of misfortune is crib death. People used not to know why it happened. They thought it was a crime committed by witches, who sucked out blood through babies’ skin. And if it wasn’t witches, it was cats. And if it wasn’t cats, it was witches in the form of cats.[viii] Crib death may have had no why, but it had plenty of who.

Early Modern physicians might know perfectly well that plague was a contagious disease. That didn’t prevent them from believing that it was also an agent – one that had its own vital purpose. Plague brought down God’s judgement on sinners.[ix] Some like to believe that modern syndromes like HIV, or Covid-19, do the same thing. Crimes like the USA’s recent wave of spree killings are routinely said to prove that God is angry about something or other.

It was the same in 1755. To some, the Lisbon earthquake was proof that God was willing to smite sinners wherever they hid. Wickedness could not go unpunished – even if punishment had to take place on All Saints Day, at 9.40 in the morning, when all the really righteous citizens were vulnerable in church. The earth itself became an agent and shook the city like a blanket. As if that weren’t enough, the other elements joined in. There was a tsunami; fires that lasted for days. Perhaps none of this would have happened if only the city had been less wicked.

This illustration, by Hugo Steiner-Prag, from the book Der Golem, is particularly interesting, because it represents ‘Fear’ as an entity – that is, an agent, with a purpose. It perfectly illustrates our point in these paragraphs.

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An interesting story comes from sixteenth-century Prague. It was common amongst gentiles to blame Prague’s Jews for bringing plague into the city. To defend his people, the mystic and scholar, rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, built a golem from clay. The creature acted as a scapegoat. It stood in the Jewish people’s place, shouldering the blame for crimes they themselves were supposed to have committed. At length, the golem (doubtless fed up) started to commit its own crimes. Worried that his people would be blamed again, the rabbi was compelled to shut his golem down.[x]

The historian Ronald Hutton argues that the so-called witch-craze was caused by:

And so ‘[a]n epidemic terror seized upon the nations; no man thought himself secure, either in his person or possessions, from the machinations of the devil and his agents’.[xi] Strange sights abounded, and the reason for them was clear. Eerie lights, flying dragons, duels among the clouds warned of terrible miracles coming. Hearsay made them yet more miraculous, yet more terrible. That’s how conspiracy theories start.

The features of the European witch were far from accidental. They served a purpose.

The journalist Bryan Appleyard once wrote a book called Aliens – Why they are here. It shows how agenticity explains both UFO sightings and the popularity of science fiction stories.[xii] He quotes a poem by Kingsley Amis:

‘What makes us rove that starlit corridor
May be the impulse to meet face to face
Our vice and folly shaped into a thing
And so at last ourselves…’

Criminals, aliens, witches...monsters, too. Here is the psychologist, Jonathan Myers: ‘Big, scary, and often extremely ugly, it’s possible we may use the monster in all its forms to crystallise our fears’.[xiii] Just so. We are dealing with a big, scary, and extremely ugly period of history. It was ripe for monsters.[xiv] Early Moderns actually told the first stories of human beings turning into monsters: vampires, werewolves, demoniacs. In Iceland, seidkonur turned into wild animals. In Sweden, it became illegal to tell a woman, ‘I saw you ride on a hurdle, with hair dishevelled, in the shape of a troll, between night and day’.[xv] And so it should be.

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We are fascinated by monsters and aliens for the same reason we are fascinated by mugshots of criminals, and for the same reason the Early Moderns used to be fascinated by woodcuts of witches. In part, we want to learn about ourselves. After all, we human beings know who we are only by the contrast we make with other people.[xvi] In its absence, we can’t say whether we are good or bad, saints or sinners. Virtually no one can face their own ‘vice and folly’. If, however, we embody them in an alien or a witch – if we project onto them - perhaps we can. We can turn them into Others.

Of course, the thought that vice and folly are out there, in the external world, is tremendously reassuring. Wherever there are monsters, there are heroes, too.[xvii] Who could they be but Us?

As you know, science fiction aliens are rarely all that alien. By and large, they resemble ordinary people with foreheads that an estate agent could advertise as development opportunities. They are people, in other words, whose outward appearance matches the ‘vice and folly’ inside.

Witch-finders reasoned in exactly that way. A witch, like a demon, needed no why. She was, after all, an Other, ‘a human being who has betrayed [...] her natural allegiances to become an agent of evil’.[xviii] She’d chosen deliberately to become a bit-player in the exciting drama of Early Modern angst. One major theme of the drama was the pulley-system, the geared levers, of Church and State, one falling as the other rose. Which would come out on top? The Church was weakening; the State was untested. Like young boxers, both needed to pad their Early Modern records with an easy victory. Both needed an Enemy. Witches were just perfect. Easy to defeat, they nevertheless looked scary. Secretive and magical, there was no way to tell they when were beaten. Technically adept, it took well-paid specialists to fight them. And, agents of evil, they could hardly complain. It has often, and rightly, been said that the only real surprise is that the witch-craze didn’t last longer.

In our post-modern world, we continue our hunt for witches. If the drama progresses, the players remain the same. Of course, we hear much more about secular witches these days than we do about traditional European ones. The most famous witch-trials of modern times were those conducted by Senator Joe McCarthy in his infamous hunt for Reds Under The Beds (it’s no coincidence that Arthur Miller dramatised McCarthy’s witch-hunt in his famous play, The Crucible). Any glance at a newspaper today will be enough to convince us that ‘witch-hunts’ are still happening. Recent victims (or alleged victims) include Rachel Zegler, JK Rowling, and Donald Trump – virtually the definition of a motley crew.

Witch-hunts are said to occur when specific, identifiable individuals rebel against some accepted, inflexible orthodoxy. Their orthodox opponents accuse them not only of harbouring unacceptable thoughts, but, bringing those unacceptable thoughts into the real world (as if by ‘magical thinking’) where they become ‘dangerous’ (another over-used word in the postmodern vocabulary). Witches, in this sense, are indistinguishable from heretics – those who pose a threat to some value-system that others hold dear. Those ‘others’ are not usually individuals – they are ‘the public’, ‘Christians’ or even ‘right-thinking people’. We can imagine them as the gang outside the fortress walls, waving the torches and the pitchforks. They look about them and see signs of change – change of a sort they don’t like. They want someone to blame, someone to dispose of. Burn the witch. A moment’s thought will give you half a dozen examples too many. Before you have a moment’s thought, though, bash a bright blue button, won’t you? Everyone will thank you: the people you love; the people you hate; the people you have not even met yet. Everyone:

PSYCHOLOGY OF THE WITCH CRAZE

The nature of evil; horror fiction; heuristics; demons; witchcraft; natural disasters; aliens; monsters

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