I'd recommend Huysman's novel, "Là-Bas", published in 1891 and a glorious, over-sensationalised, mess of a book about modern-day (for the day) occultism and black magic in Paris. Being French, he opens the book with a harangue about modern literature and the school of Naturalism 😀
"Certainly if naturalism confined one to monotonous studies of mediocre persons and to interminable inventories of the objects in a drawing-room or a landscape, an honest and clear-sighted artist would soon cease to produce, and a less conscientious workman would be under the necessity of repeating himself over and over again to the point of nausea. Nevertheless Durtal could see no possibilities for the novelist outside of naturalism. Were we to go back to the pyrotechnics of romanticism, rewrite the lanuginous works of the Cherbuliez and Feuillet tribe, or, worse yet, imitate the lachrymose storiettes of Theuriet and George Sand? Then what was to be done? And Durtal, with desperate determination, set to work sorting out a tangle of confused theories and inchoate postulations. He made no headway. He felt but could not define. He was afraid to. Definition of his present tendencies would plump him back into his old dilemma.
"We must," he thought, "retain the documentary veracity, the precision of detail, the compact and sinewy language of realism, but we must also dig down into the soul and cease trying to explain mystery in terms of our sick senses. If possible the novel ought to be compounded of two elements, that of the soul and that of the body, and these ought to be inextricably bound together as in life. Their interreactions, their conflicts, their reconciliation, ought to furnish the dramatic interest. In a word, we must follow the road laid out once and for all by Zola, but at the same time we must trace a parallel route in the air by which we may go above and beyond.... A spiritual naturalism! It must be complete, powerful, daring in a different way from anything that is being attempted at present. Perhaps as approaching my concept I may cite Dostoyevsky. Yet that exorable Russian is less an elevated realist than an evangelic socialist. In France right now the purely corporal recipe has brought upon itself such discredit that two clans have arisen: the liberal, which prunes naturalism of all its boldness of subject matter and diction in order to fit it for the drawing-room, and the decadent, which gets completely off the ground and raves incoherently in a telegraphic patois intended to represent the language of the soul—intended rather to divert the reader's attention from the author's utter lack of ideas. As for the right wing verists, I can only laugh at the frantic puerilities of these would-be psychologists, who have never explored an unknown district of the mind nor ever studied an unhackneyed passion. They simply repeat the saccharine Feuillet and the saline Stendhal. Their novels are dissertations in school-teacher style. They don't seem to realize that there is more spiritual revelation in that one reply of old Hulot, in Balzac's Cousine Bette, 'Can't I take the little girl along?' than in all their doctoral theses. We must expect of them no idealistic straining toward the infinite. For me, then, the real psychologist of this century is not their Stendhal but that astonishing Ernest Hello, whose unrelenting unsuccess is simply miraculous!"
He began to think that Des Hermies was right. In the present disorganized state of letters there was but one tendency which seemed to promise better things. The unsatisfied need for the supernatural was driving people, in default of something loftier, to spiritism and the occult."
I wouldn't be surprised if they take it up now that Scott's posted about it. There will probably have to be a few intervening posters/twitterers given how unpopular Scott is with the social-justice left, but the BDSM jokes write themselves.
The last question (why do smart people believe in witches) is something that I think I have some small amount of experience with, given that I dated a girl whose family members had been accused of witchcraft and who had accused others of being witches in turn. Her family lived in semi-rural Nigeria, and witchcraft accusations are both common and taken incredibly seriously there.
As far as I can tell, witchcraft accusations in Nigeria seemed to be an excuse to do something terrible to the other person. It was a sort of casus belli in a world in which the law was incredibly unreliable and also didn't reflect societal norms. So, a guy who regularly doesn't pay his workers could be called a witch, and then it'd be societally appropriate to run him out of the village. Or, if a woman sleeps with your husband, she's a witch, and then you can go to her house with your relatives and start shit.
What was especially weird from my perspective is that everyone kind of knew it was bullshit, but it was really convenient. Also, people who did what we would normally consider witchcraft, like curses for hire or prognostication, rebranded themselves as prophets in the Christian tradition and so didn't get in trouble.
I had a really hard time convincing my then girlfriend that the whole witchcraft thing was terrible societally, even though she didn't believe in it (although she believed in the existence of black magic/Satanic stuff more broadly). I think mob justice is honestly just a really useful way of getting shit done, and in the absence of fact finding/depositions, it's tough to prove things even if you know it's true. Like, if you catch a person red-handed stealing, you don't need to call them a witch. You just grab them, haul them out in public, and tire them. It's horrific but it stops people from stealing.
But, if a building collapses and your brother dies, you can get together with your relatives, decide who to blame (the owner? the engineer?), then mutually decide there's some kind of witchcraft and feel fully justified in beating the shit out of him. This would also make it difficult for his relatives to retaliate unless they can prove he wasn't a witch/didn't deserve the beating. I figure there was probably a similar thing going on in rural England in the 1500s.
A guy I knew from Ghana told me that his sister was killed by a witch. Evidence: his sister's leg got swollen and, lacking the money for the hospital, they took her to a witch doctor. The doctor pulled pins out of her leg (worth pointing out this is a classic of sleight-of-hand street magic) and said they'd been put there by a witch. She died a bit later, in her 30s. He concluded the story by saying "I know you don't believe in witches" and I was like it's not like I don't believe in witches, I just think it sounds more like her leg was infected and he was like maybe, but there was no money for the hospital, so what difference does it make? And I was like, damn, good point.
Still, it doesn't take the Mayo clinic to be able to say "Hey, your wound is infected, here's some antibiotics". I don't have any medical training whatsoever but I like to think I could practice medicine at that sort of level.
Even so, a country that believes in infections will act differently than a country that believes in witches; and on a personal level, one might avoid wasting money on pin-pulling and instead spend some on disinfectants or cleaning the wound.
That is a story my late mother told me years ago about her father. When he was a boy, he struck or hit or kicked or otherwise meddled with a black dog (see here for why that is a bad idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_dog_(folklore)
His leg swelled up and he was confined to bed. I don't know if his parents tried seeking a doctor, but anyway they did get the local cunning man/quack doctor in. He said something over the leg (charms, prayers, who knows?) and took 'things' out of it - yes, your basic psychic surgery as above.
Grandad got better. Since the witch tradition is weak in Ireland, this wasn't considered witchcraft nor the practitioner a witch; he was the 'quack doctor', that is, the local wise man with cures for things conventional medicine couldn't touch, like being fairy struck.
My wife has an interesting story from living in Ukraine. Her Grandmother told her she was a practicing witch, but one of the good ones. My wife doesn't really believe in her stories, but her witchcraft is one of the only things she got from her grandmother, so she hasn't abandoned it completely.
And as far as the Grandmother being a witch, one, it was probably past down to her similarly, and two, she lived through both the Holocaust and Holodomor. She couldn't practice her religion, so it's not surprising she clinged to something spiritual.
For a more or less contemporary response (okay, less, it was published in 1584, a century later), I recommend Reginald Scot's _The Discoverie of Witchcraft_. It's just as detailed, just as carefully researcher, and just as fascinating in is coverage of beliefs about magic and witchcraft. But Scot takes some of the devout Christianity, and some of the belief in magic (he thinks astrology is legit), and mixes in a strong streak of recognizably modern skepticism. So against the idea that Kramer is just a reasonable person going along with what seem like reasonable beliefs at the time, there's the example of Scot. He has basically the same set of evidence to work with and some of the same baseline beliefs, but he correctly reasons his way to the conclusion that a lot of "witchcraft" accusations are just people acting out their prejudices against women who have done nothing worse than being poor and socially isolated.
Please stop with the claim that this was some sort of feminism/patriarchy thing. In some places the victims were mainly women, in some places (most well known is Muscovy) they were mainly men.
The vast majority of people accused of witchcraft in England were also men IIRC. But, obviously feminists wanting to craft a narrative about suppression of women's power don't really care about those.
Given that Kramer was clearly misogynistic, I don't think it absurd to suggest that such sentiments may have played a role. (Of course, it does not follow that witch hunts were simply powerful men hating women, case closed.)
Yeah, the line between magic and science gets really blurry the further back you go. Newton messed around with alchemy, for instance. A lot of times it's not clear how, with the knowledge they had at the time, they could know astrology and alchemy were false. I mean, the moon really does affect the tides, who's to say Mars doesn't influence war or Venus love, with a prescientific knowledge base?
If you're bored you can check out Agrippa's books of occult philosophy; the poor guy's trying to draw principles from items of information, but all his information's BS.
Augustine, in his "Confessions", sort of pauses the whole book midway through to go on a rant where he does a semi-scientific debunking of astrology ("I knew a guy who knew two kids born at the same second, yet one was a rich man's son and one a slave, and they had very different life outcomes. And even if you don't believe that story, what about twins who may have very different personalities and paths in life?").
This would have been written around the year 400 AD. He had some motivated reasoning (he wanted to discredit Manichaeans who were big on astrology), but the basic arguments against astrology were definitely available to people.
As well, consider that 21st century alchemy machines produce 10% of the world's electricity which is more valuable annually than the amount of gold mined worldwide
Nuclear reactors? But that's naturally occurring alchemy, right? The uranium's radioactive, it'll change into something else without you doing anything.
I do find it amusing that after centuries trying to turn lead into gold, we find that lots of things turn themselves into lead by themselves.
We did figure out how to turn lead into gold. It just takes a 600 MeV proton beam and the results are radioactive. And it costs more than the gold is worth by orders of magnitude. But we can do it!
Montague Summers was never a Catholic priest. He was ordained as an Anglican deacon and later claimed to be a Catholic priest as part of a weird larp, but he was just an independent scholar and writer.
The Catholic Church holds that demons are real, demonic possession is real, and has rites of exorcism for the latter.
This is at best loosely related to the question of whether witchcraft was practiced in early modern Europe. Historical note: Prosecutions for witchcraft were more common and intense in Protestant countries (especially Germany, England, and Scotland) than in Catholic ones, although they took place in both.
The Vatican's chief exorcist (prior to his death a few years back, not sure who replaced him), Fr Gabriele Amorth, wrote some books branded as "from the Vatican's chief exorcist" on his experiences and beliefs in which he's fairly explicit that he believes in medieval-style witches exactly of the type described above. He also makes a big point of saying that most people who exorcists see are just mentally ill, and has some interesting Marian heresies.
Of course, as Scott slightly touches on, belief in "satanists" with very real witchy powers is extremely mainstream in right-wing American Protestantism, and there are people still imprisoned from the witch hunts of the 80s.
As I've pointed out, belief in witchcraft by its opponents is orthogonal to the question of whether there were practitioners of witchcraft in their own self-understanding.
In anything, in the context of the 15-16th century, one would expect these two things to *positively* correlate. It is precisely a widespread cultural belief in the reality of witchcraft that would lead some to practice it, some to oppose it.
aA feminist, whose name escapes me, once pointed out - if the witches had the power attributed to them they would have been co-opted into the late medieval system. There would have been schools of witchcraft. Men would have sought them out, or taken over witchcraft.
The personal trappings of the supposed witch; the cat, the broom, the pot are all symbols of a woman who needs both companionship and an animal to catch mice, likes to keep a clean house, and has to eat.
There’s something really sad about that. These are the bare necessities of the poor. Try and keep a clean house and the b*stards will get you, and make the symbols of your genteel poverty reason to kill you.
Sometimes the cruelty of the past is exaggerated, witch hunts boil my piss though.
There is a section in the Malleus on "archer wizards", witches (usually male in this case) who through a pact with the Devil get the power to shoot arrows very effectively. Kramer suggests that these people *have* been co-opted, and he is constantly complaining that princes keep them around to shoot their enemies and refuse to let him prosecute them.
It's unlikely that WWIII would actually set us back to pre-gunpowder; for starters, even in the worst-case scenario where most of the human population dies, then the remaining ammunition is sufficient for a longer time than it would be with our current population.
(Also, nuclear winter's unlikely to be bad enough to collapse society in, say, Brazil.)
Brazilian agriculture is intensely dependent on oil and fertiliser imports from thousands of miles away. Nuclear winter might not take away their rainfall but it would be a catastrophe from Brazilians in any number of other ways.
Fair point, although there'd still be the capacity to feed at least a large chunk of the current population. I guess there's still the possibility of technological/infrastructure loss at that point, though probably not quite that much of it.
It is real, it's just less bad than the alarmists want you to think. The key bit I think you might have missed is that the comment that started this didn't give a timeframe for WWIII; it's plausible that arsenals could inflate back to Cold War levels or higher in the next few decades if SALT/START fall apart (note that the PRC is not party to SALT/START and is currently trying for nuclear parity; if the PRC doesn't sign on to something similar then we straight-up are looking at another arms race).
At those kinds of numbers, with tens of thousands of nukes getting exchanged, essentially everyone (including Bean, with whom I largely agree) agrees that there'd be non-negligible climatic effects. Definitely not going to kill us all - I ran the numbers on that a while back - and probably not going to set us back pre-gunpowder, but "nuclear winter isn't real" is overstating the case.
Oh, I have some vague recollection that 50s folklore/revival of 'witch' traditions held that Robin and his Merry Men were a coven, with Marion being the Queen.
For all the same reasons you put: outlaws, going out to the greenwood, etc.
Can't very likely have been the '50s since wicca barely existed then (Gardner started in '54 at Bricket Wood, IIRC), but that stuff definitely filtered into the alternative pop culture of America later. The 1991 Robin Hood adventure game Conquests of the Longbow involves Marian being a pagan priestess/witch, among other occult and pseudo-Celtic business.
I thought the connection to paganism started with the 1980s TV series Robin of Sherwood (also the origin of the "Robin had a Saracen friend" trope): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_of_Sherwood
"A hundred and sixty years ago, when Ritson produced his then exhaustive treatise on Robin Hood such an enquiry as I am embarking upon could not have been conceived. Opinions might then have differed as to whether the outlaw had lived in the twelfth, thirteenth or fourteenth century, and whether he was a yeoman or an earl, but everyone was agreed that he was both historical and human. It was only when folklore was invented, and Grimm began analysing fairy tales, that first, Thomas Wright, and then others, claimed for Robin Hood a supernatural origin. He was proved, in turn, to be a Teutonic mythical sprite, a sun-god, Mithras, Woodicock, the Man in Green, the Hobby Horse, and finally they dying god popularised by Sir James Frazer.
It is two versions of this last interpretation of Robin Hood that I want to consider here: that Robin Hood is Grand Master of a coven of witches, and an incarnation of Cernunnus, the Horned God of the Old Stone Age; and that he is a spirit of vegetation, doomed to die periodically for the good of the crops.
…In sum – you may go to the Old Stone Age for Jolly Robin, or Robin Goodfellow – for covens of female witches prancing round a stag-man, or for a dying victim of the seasons. But you will not find Robin Hood. He belongs absolutely to the mediaeval world of the long bow, the guild fraternity, and the Catholic Church."
Co-opt easily demonstratable male "witch" talent but not female I guess!
Considering that there was money and power to be had in giving women equal rights, I find it interesting that they were not "co-opted" by rulers i.e allowed to be maximally productive.
I think it's just really none obvious that social reality isn't physical reality, especially when its hard to find counterexamples.
Conspiracy theory I've heard for the rise of (second-wave) feminism was with the rise of labor-saving devices, it was now more economically efficient to have women working outside the home. And, a la Two-Income Trap, it drives down wages too, so now you need two incomes to get by.
Theoratically, if an household works twice the hours, they should be able to produce roughly twice the commodities they would otherwise. So save for the availablility of capital the net wages should be unaffected.
Unequal rights for women has *always* been about maximizing their productivity, just not in cash wages, and in a way that violates bodily autonomy by contemporary sensibilities: women’s work has been to bear and raise children (who in turn work farms, tend animals, and care for other children).
I think not, i think, if anything, its been about maximizing the productivity that the *husband can capture*.
Though actually, i think it was mostly from the sincere belief that women were on average, much stupider than men in most things, which is, of course, absurd, but becomes self-fulfilling when everyone believes it, and is very hard to shake if its a religious belief. It may even be paired with the deontological moral belief that women *should* be subservient or confine themselves to a sphere that makes them, on average, more subservient.
All the other stuff where men profit from the labor of women reinforces this belief, but I don't think it began with that.
Though maybe there is more to it, because it seems so strange to me that it evolved, as far as I can tell, literally everywhere, which is one of the more vexing anthropological questions.
Like, if women are better on average social skills, and social skills lead to status, then what gives? Shouldn't they have grabbed power in the hunter-gatherer days?
My guess is it has to do with the differing aggression levels on average, with most aggressive guys becoming the rulers? Or maybe the schizophrenics, who are more likely to be men becoming shamans?
But that doesn't explain anything, because why would they single out women for discrimination?
Although there are lots of scary things that governments don't co-opt. Like, serial killers. Nobody wonders why the government doesn't recruit cadres of serial killers and unleash them on their enemies. It would be impossible.
Maybe the mental model was "witchcraft sometimes works but is too chaotic, unpredictable, and dangerous for a state to reliably use as a weapon."
It doesn't seem completely crazy to me that the CIA could occasionally put together a real-life "suicide squad" for black-ops stuff (minus the superpowers and internal bombs). Take some messed-up people who nobody will miss, turn them loose on designated targets in a place where nobody cares who gets hurt, and cross your fingers. Yes, the probability of success would be low (unless your operatives were more like Frank Abignail Jr. and less like Harley Quinn) but it seems like something an overconfident bureaucrat would try at least once.
It was not historically uncommon for governments to recruit convicts as an alternative to prison, and certain pirates have been pardoned and enlisted as well; lots of precedent and even some claims that it's happening in the current Russo-Ukrainian war.
Uhhh, not likey ? Giving unreliable and unstable individuals military training and access to military grade equipment and training and force your personal into close extended contact with them, ????, profit ? How can you force people like this to follow orders ? Why wouldn't they empty their machine guns into civilians for pleasure or even succeed at the objective but refuse to evacuate?
Successful uses of criminals by the state are usually examples like colonization and pirates. Both of these examples it weren't the "Serial Killer" type of criminals, more like the usual mix of opportunists and once-good mostly-still-good people that is the majority of criminals.
The CIA is crazy and evil beyond understanding, so I wouldn't say it's necessarily representative of other intelligence agencies (who are crazy and evil beyond understanding and shouldn't be representative of anything human) or other military-ish organizations.
Russia is using convicts to fight in Ukraine, today. I'd recommend the leaked footage of Prigozhin giving a recruiting pitch to a yard full of them, it's pretty wild. "We're very careful about taking perpetrators of sexual assualt... but we understand mistakes happen"
I didn't find the argument convincing but the book CHAOS which was published like a year ago basically argues that Manson was working for the CIA as a kind of asset to infiltrate into Hollywood high society and they gave him money and a bunch of drugs to keep him and his followers happy, but woops that didn't work out great never mind.
He doesn't argue explicitly for any particular theory, just lays out a case that the CIA and FBI were all up in Manson's business and either he was a direct asset or being manipulated to do their bidding and.. isn't that weird? I think the author probably believes they were either trying to actually spark Manson's race war or just generally discredit the hippie movement by making news
maybe sometimes, far more likely they use actual soldiers or police for none suicide missions.
I think one real-life example is South Korea put together a suicide squad to hypothetically assassinate Kim Jung il after he had tried to assassinate their PM. They trained a bunch of petty criminals in a very harsh special forces training environment that killed 20 percent of them. They were called Unit 684
Ultimately, they decided against going through with the assassination, but they kept the unit on the island, which was confined to the island, the unit figured they were going to die anyway, or were just being irrational and tried to assassinate their own PM instead. They got most of their training officers and their CO, were stopped in Seul, and killed themselves/survivors were executed.
I don't think it would be impossible for a government to recruit serial killers. I do think it would be a waste of time because governments already have people who are better at killing than serial killers are.
The Nazis did, but that was due to Nazis being evil and their enemies being large numbers of Polish civilians. The leader of that unit, Oskar Dirlewanger, was killed shortly after being captured in 1945 and the Allied leadership didn't care and quietly covered it up.
Yeah. It's be as stupid as e.g. the west trying to co-opt mujahideen onto their side of the cold war. No government would be naive enough to say they're the enemy of my enemy and support them despite the many obvious ways in which that could go wrong.
Governments do hire soldiers to kill a bunch of people. I don't think they're generally the type of person to become a serial killer unprompted, but that's why they don't need to co-opt it. They can get a regular person to kill.
I'm not sure if he was a feminist but Mark Twain made this point. If a witch could have made storms the King of England would have bribed them to make storms any time there was an invasion. He included it in The Prince and the Pauper.
>If a witch could have made storms the King of England would have bribed them to make storms any time there was an invasion. He included it in The Prince and the Pauper.
Oh interesting. The witches in Fort Salem specialize in tornadoes and were used to defeat the British in the Revolutionary war, I wonder if that premise was inspired by Mark Twain.
Not specifically that, but I think there is a version of George Washington crossing the Delaware with witches behind him cranking out tornadoes.
It's not a show I can recommend generally. Very much guilty pleasure territory. It's also extremely 'young adult' with burning teenage romantic angst, so much it is likely not tolerable my many adults. But I have a strong capability to enjoy media of almost any quality as long as I find some aspect of it interesting, and I appreciate that they at least aimed high in their worldbuilding here.
I can recommend both the book and TV series of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - though it's Britain co-opting magic to defeat the French in the Napoleonic Wars (and that's only a subplot).
Yeah, that does seem too good to pass up. (I kinda have the same problem with the X-Men universe- there's no way people like Storm or Jean Grey are not going to be at the centre of a frantic bidding war between governments.)
Though Mark Twain didn't make this point the House of Plantagenet sometimes claimed to be descended from demons. So it's not as if it'd have been a hard bar to power anyway.
Also, yeah, any world with supers should work extremely differently from our own. Technology should be less advanced, militaries should be more even and more about super units, etc.
I hadn't heard that. Do you have a source I can read more? It certainly didn't show up in Elizabethan propaganda. But that doesn't mean it wasn't around.
You might be amused that William the Conqueror is recorded as having hired a witch to hurl spells at his enemies during a siege.
>A feminist, whose name escapes me, once pointed out - if the witches had the power attributed to them they would have been co-opted into the late medieval system. There would have been schools of witchcraft. Men would have sought them out, or taken over witchcraft.
You've basically described the premise of the low budget Hulu TV show "Fort Salem". It's a young adult military academy drama set in an alternative universe where the Witches of Salem reveal themselves and then ally with the USA against the British during the Revolutionary War and have remained a branch of the US military ever since.
This is also the premise (sort of) of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, which is a pretty fun book involving British wizards working for the Crown against Napoleon.
I think this underestimate the fact that people really believed their religion. Maybe getting a witch as an ally is a good way to get a military advantage over your neighbouring lords. But if it means getting on the wrong side of God the utility calculation becomes quite clear.
(Besides people also really believed in witchcraft which for the purpose of leveraging witch power into actual power is basically the same thing as having actual witch power).
>We prohibit under anathema that murderous art of crossbowmen and archers, which is hateful to God, to be employed against Christians and Catholics from now on.
The problem is that all it takes is one guy in the royal family to hire someone to shoot everyone ahead of him in line for the throne with magic arrows, and then the generals of opposing armies. Also, apparently he was saying that archer wizards were a common thing, so the question is how there were any stable governments instead of them all being shot by magic arrows. I guess they all know what words to use to avoid getting shot? And all their generals? But all of them keep it secret from the general populace just to make it a little more likely that they can can use it on some new enemy?
There does seem to be an implicit assumption that there are nice witches you can go and talk to (and a linked category of perfectly ok wise women). The problem with books like the Malleus is it’s a product of an unusually educated/theologically astute clerical subculture. The peasants may just have believed old women had magical powers, and some of them were evil.
Frankly, the “witches” themselves may have gone along with this, so they could sell magic to make a living and deter people from attacking/exploiting them. Much of this is during the wars of religion, so there’d be lots of widows and spinsters and a fairly unreliable legal system for commoners. There are also, as Scott points out, psychological/coping reasons why traumatised people at the bottom of society might want to believe they have magical revenge powers.
Yeah, I definitely get the sense that there were a lot of people (mostly old women) practising what we'd probably now call Traditional European Medicine.
> if the witches had the power attributed to them they would have been co-opted into the late medieval system. There would have been schools of witchcraft. Men would have sought them out, or taken over witchcraft
That seems a bit sexist. If witches had the power attributed to them then they probably would have just taken over the kingdoms for themselves.
(Which, I suppose, is a good reason not to attempt to co-opt them, if you're the existing power structure.)
That's irrelevant to what Andrew is wondering, though ;)
Half the population generally doesn't imagine they previously had a penis they used for that purpose, and now only have "nothing but [their] smooth body" in its place.
Modern spirituality tends to be vague ("we see through a glass darkly") so it's often forgotten how scholarly and precise the medievals were in classifying the supernatural world. There's a whole genre of demonology literature breaking down all the ranks and orders of spirits ("Furies", who sow mischief, "maligenii", who tempt and ensare, and so on).
At times it has the air of a really complex DnD setting. Not by accident, really - Gygax et al drew heavily on those sources when creating fictional monsters like cacodemons and so on. "Demonic possession" would have sounded very vague in the middle ages. Almost like a modern person saying "I have a virus".
I suppose there's a psychological pull toward the idea that theories are intrinsically good, and the more detailed they are, the better. "Once our grimoires classified 600 spirits. Now they classify 700! Our understanding of the world is advancing!"
>"Demonic possession" would have sounded very vague in the middle ages. Almost like a modern person saying "I have a virus".
I like to think that one of the reasons complex supernatural/spiritual classification schemes have fallen out of favor is that they used to provide a useful framework to deal with all kinds of questions, but that this function has been mostly taken over by modern psychology, meteorology and others.
If you look in places like Tibetan Buddhism, elaborate and very systematic descriptions of the astral planes and things like that (including demons) are still very much in use today.
"Somewhere out there, there still lurk pitfalls in our common-sensical and well-intentioned thought processes, maybe just as dark and dangerous as the ones that made Henry Kramer devote his life to eradicating a scourge that didn’t exist."
Yes, and this vindicates all of my ideas and beliefs specifically.
One of the very first xkcd cartoon was about how Monty Python became known for surreal, iconoclast, original humour and then were quoted to death in the most boring and unoriginal way.
This only really applies to Holy Grail, which has the most of the spontaneous absurdism. I don't see how it applies to their sketches like Four Yorkshiremen or The Accountant, or most of the bits from Life of Brian, unless you extend it to meaning "everything is only ever funny the first time".
Scott, a couple times in times in this post, you pretty glibly assert that witches didn't exist. I wonder why you think you know that?
We need to separate two orthogonal questions:
1) Whether there were people who, in their own self-understanding, were "practicing witchcraft;"
2) Whether "practicing witchcraft" had any real supernatural power.
Let's just stipulate for the sake of discussion that the answer to 2 is "absolutely not." It doesn't follow that the answer to 1 couldn't still be "yes."
In particular, if the prevailing beliefs of the culture were such that plenty of people believed in the Malleus Maleficarum (and so be motivated to investigate witchcraft), then why couldn't those prevailing beliefs also be such that at least some small number of people would, you know, try to practice witchcraft (in sense 1, not 2)?
We have people in our population who engage in all manner of weird crimes for selfish/weird reasons. Why isn't it a perfectly good theory that some small percentage of the population in the 1500's engaged in witchcraft? One needn't posit that they were well-described by the Malleus Maleficarum. (There were a fair number of American Communists in the 1930's, but they are not necessarily well-described in anti-communist writing.)
Scott never asserts that there were no witches in the sense of 1; in fact he specifically says that there may well have been - ctrl-F "And I don't want to completely rule out".
Ah, you're right! I read too quickly and somehow missed that paragraph. My bad!
But ... I'm still not sure that paragraph does full justice to my point. Scott closes the post with a reference to the beliefs that made "Henry Kramer devote his life to eradicating a scourge that didn’t exist." I'm saying that it's possible that the scourge really did exist (in sense 1), however differently from Kramer we would interpret that phenomenon.
Another analogy: in Russia in 1916, only a tiny percentage of the population were Bolsheviks, but none of us would say that the Bolsheviks "didn't exist." And this statement is completely orthogonal to how well we would take the beliefs of the Bolsheviks to map onto reality.
One problem here (for me at least) is that the witchcraft claims follow almost to a tee blood libel claims. And as a practicing Jew, I can confirm that we don’t drink the blood of Christian children, and that’s like, never been a thing. Therefore, it stands to reason (among many other reasons) that witchcraft has also never been a thing, and I can say that with a very high degree of confidence.
I don't see how that follows at all. Seems like very weak reasoning by analogy.
The following two things can be true:
1) False accusations were made against Jews due to ethno-religious hostility;
2) People (nominally Christian) engaged in a variety of folk practices, some derived from older pagan culture, some re-conceptualized in (inverse) Christian terms, which were met by intense hostility from the dominant Christian culture, and to which false accusations were added.
Far from contradicting each other, those two things seem highly compatible.
If I'm reading this dispute correctly, it looks like you need to unpack "practicing witchcraft" in your original point #1.
It's possible for a person to self-report "practicing witchcraft" in the sense of "I grow medicinal plants, make extractions of them, put them in cauldrons to try to craft tinctures that help people when they feel sick. And also, I fly around on a broomstick occasionally", and an accuser to report them as "practicing witcraft" in the sense of "you kill people with poisons and curses and also wither the towns' livestock and have sex with demons".
If you conflate these two definitions of "practicing witchcraft" without clarifying that each person actually means something completely different, you don't get the result you'd expect by just thinking about it as an atomic descriptor.
But a lot of it was not "I try to make tinctures to help people when they feel sick". There are plenty of superstitions and charms and spells to do harm to people, even if you're not a witch but you live in a peasant community that believes in these kinds of things.
Human nature being what it is, some people probably did want to cause harm to others, be that murder for gain, or revenge on enemies, or just "I hate everyone and I want to get back at them". So they would have tried spells and charms and potions and deals with the Devil.
Sometimes Goody Proctor really did make your cattle sick, because she was an enemy of yours. Whether she did it by dosing them with potions (our naturalistic explanation) or because she thought that the spell used to make the potions (witchcraft explanation) was the efficient cause doesn't make a difference to the motive: she was acting out of bad intentions to deliberately cause harm.
Not everybody, of course. But also not everybody accused was likely to have been innocent of no more than "dabbling in healing tinctures".
I take it for granted that "witchcraft" (in my OP sense 1) covers a variety of beliefs and practices, some benign, some not so benign. I don't treat it as an atomic descriptor.
That said, I don't think we need a detailed mapping to make sense of the notion that some people were indeed "practicing witchcraft," both as a self-understanding and as an accurate external description.
In my own view, one would have to go beyond naturalistic herbal medicine to qualify. There would need to some appeal to non-naturalistic beliefs and/or intent to harm. (Maleficium, after all, literally means "wrong doing.")
> And as a practicing Jew, I can confirm that we don’t drink the blood of Christian children, and that’s like, never been a thing.
I can see how being a practicing Jew would lend you some authority on what Jews are currently doing. I don't see how it's relevant to whether you can confirm that that's never been a thing.
Ariel Toaff is a practising Jew, son of the Chief Rabbi of Rome Elio Toaff who hosted Pope John Paul II on his first visit to a synogogue. Himself a rabbi, Ariel Toaff is also a professor of Medieval and Renaissance History.
His historical research suggested that it might have been a thing at some point, at least in a particular geographical location.
"Toaff's analysis, which is focused on the Trent trials, depends on two main theses. The first concerns the value of the confessions made under torture. In Toaff's view, the statements made by the accused can be believed when they concern details of ritual practices that the judges could not possibly be familiar with. Toaff's second argument relies on the concordance of the confessions. The fact that a number of confessions are identical is proof, according to Toaff, of their undoubted veracity.
The reaction of most historians was extremely critical. Among the criticisms made, three problems were especially important. The first concerns the use made of sources. Inquisitorial proceedings, which depended on confessions extracted by torture, do not allow historians to observe the “voices” of the accused. Further, the fact that dozens, perhaps hundreds of accounts of ritual murder resemble each other does not prove, in and of itself, that such killings actually occurred. This may in fact prove that the confessions were false (the accused told whatever the judges wanted them to say). Toaff has taken over, uncritically, the partisan notion formulated by the bishop of Trent (whose views caused a good deal of perplexity in Rome at the time), who ignored all the evidence against the notion of ritual murder, including all the papal bulls and all the imperial and royal decrees that were issued between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries in unequivocal rejection of the blood libel.
Toaff relied imprudently on the testimony of Jewish converts and on hagiographical narratives such as those of Bonelli (1747) and Divina (1902), written obviously in support of Simonino's elevation to sainthood. Using hagiographical sources without taking precautions raises a fundamental question: is it possible to study the question of ritual murder accusations narrowly, in isolation, without analyzing the cultural context and, above all, without reconstructing the long development of stereotypes of Jewish difference in Christian theology?According to some historians, Toaff did not merely misinterpret but actually manipulated his sources in his effort to distinguish between Ashkenazi Jewry (violent and “fundamentalist”) and Italian Jewry (civilized and tolerant).
A second problem with Toaff's approach has to do with the mythic dimension of the blood libel. Toaff confuses the myth with the ritual. Worse, he is in the grip of the myth. He keeps thinking from within the myth. Is it possible to approach the question of ritual murder or that of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion logically, factually? “Both have been exposed as false again and again. This has not kept millions of people, in Russia and now mostly in the Arab world, from swearing that they are true and that they provide an explanation of the world's history.”In the way of myths of power, the blood libel acts almost magically: it depends on realism while at the same time removing itself from the logic of proof. This is why the publishing house of Bollati-Boringhieri decided to reprint F. Jesi's L’accusa del sangue, a book that highlights the importance of the mechanisms that produce myths and assure their reception.
Finally, there is the nature of Toaff's narrative. He moves from one source to another, in a cavalier fashion, “going back to the Trent trial and moving on to the events in Norwich, to an iconographic study of sixteenth-century haggadoth and to the rituals associated with the Seder, to end with the sad and grotesque adventure of a German Jew, a painter of miniatures, implicated by pure chance in the events at Trent.” Toaff's style is lively, reminiscent of tabloid sensationalism. Readers may find themselves agreeing with the accusers as the author goes out of his way to address himself to “a public accustomed to screen violence in the movies. … Readers of Toaff's story encounter colorful protagonists whose psychology is simple: ‘Jewish adventurers engaged in illegal dealings,’‘a clever physician from Candia,’‘a strange young painter,’ a German rabbi who performs circumcisions (the Cutter!), ‘Jewish children handed over to the dangerous blade of his knife.’ And, why not, cannibalism, leprosy, suicide, buckets of blood.” Toaff erases the distinction between true and false. “This book is a tragedy. It is filled with half truths, a mixture of testimonies and points of view that are not believable. The way in which this book is written encourages the non specialist reader to reach conclusions of a very serious nature.”
This communiqué, which takes an ahistorical approach to the traditions of Judaism (“There has never existed…”), was followed by a statement coming from Ariel Toaff's father (“I am not at all in agreement with him, rather I oppose him”...
Now his position was: “My statement was an ironical academic provocation, designed to begin the process of breaking the taboo that surrounds research into the antichristian atmosphere within certain Ashkenazi European communities in the Middle Ages.”"
In particular, I can totally imagine someone who, under the sway of some kind of anti-semitic theories, decides that if drinking blood of children is the source of power of those evil people, then maybe I should try it too and "become one of them", without realizing it made them totally different.
You can confirm Jews exist though. The analogue here is the old idea of witches as a kind of big underground cult that didn’t have supernatural powers but believed they did.
Although I think there's a potentially interesting question of whether there might have occasionally been some underground cults that tried to imitate what they thought Jews were and engaged in some of the horrific practices that were attributed to them at the time.
I don't know that you'd even need that explicit a Jewish angle. The Crime of Gador in Spain (link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_Gádor) happened at a time when Spain was basically devoid of Jews, and speaks to at least some European populations engaging in ritual child murder.
More to the point (when it comes to blood libel), there are probably under 100 purported victims across Europe and the Middle East, between the 12th and 20th Centuries. I've no idea what the number of ritual child murders per capita per annum is, but you do a low-ball fermi estimate, taking population of the relevant area at any given time as 100,000,000 (well below the real figure), then to get one ritual child murder every eight years you'd need a PCPA figure of 1/800,000,000 (which would equate to about one every three years in the modern US - I've no idea if this is right, but the US has about 1,500 child murders every year so it sounds plausible that 0.067% would at least meet the bar of "deeply fucked up murders by a stranger").
I think the numbers wouldn't add up to say that all or most of the blood libel cases were ritual murders by Jews, without Jews being more likely to commit them than gentiles (you'd need a substantially higher rate of ritual child murders than looks plausible). I think you can explain the rest of it with the idea setting in after William of Norwich, then becoming people's default theory of who's responsible when you find a weirdly murdered child in an era before forensics. I'd love to know if instances of blood libel went down once belief in witchcraft became acceptable among elites in the 16th Century to get an insight into this point.
Thing is, there's a lot of stuff that peasant and folk communities do that straddles the line between superstition and witchcraft.
You have a falling out with a neighbour and want to cause them harm?
You can bury eggs on their land, which will cause their crops to fail and their cattle won't thrive on the grazing.
You can cause their cows to abort by throwing the afterbirth of an aborted calf onto their land.
Two examples from country folklore of my own region.
So everyone believed in magic because everyone was pretty much using little spells themselves, be that charms, prayers, think of things like "bury a statue of St Joseph in your yard to ensure you sell your house" and the like. Then you had people like wise women and cunning men, who knew cures and spells and you consulted them if you needed help. Having the knowledge to do good meant they also had the knowledge to do harm (if you know how to cure poisoning, you also know what plants are poisonous).
So then take that a step further. You have a quarrel with a neighbour, or bad things start happening. What is causing that? When the usual causes are dismissed, then you start looking for unusual causes - like magic.
And maybe you suspect that woman who goes about telling people if they displease her, she will curse them - like Alice Kyteler, or Kepler's mother:
Is there any evidence of an actual alternate religion being practiced, though? We have cases where the Church tried to persecute actual heresies like the Cathars. There's the theory going around it was a survival of pre-Christian European folk religion, but I'm not sure how strong the evidence for that is.
I don't think there is evidence of "an actual alternate religion," but I also don't think that's what witchcraft was. I described it above as something much looser, "people (nominally Christian) engaged in a variety of folk practices, some derived from older pagan culture, some re-conceptualized in (inverse) Christian terms."
From my understanding, one of the goals of the inquisition was to catch people who had non-Christian beliefs while they pretended to be Christians (mostly to avoid being killed or get kicked out of the country, I guess). Not because they believed their rituals effective, just out of general principle.
In the mindset of an organization happy to root out Jews and Muslims, going after people who believe they can influence the world by supernatural means contrary to Church doctrine seems like a no-brainer.
Of course, in my model of the medieval world, basically everyone used superstitious practices not grounded in church doctrine. Burning every peasant who nailed a horseshoe to their home would probably not have been feasible. But trying to root out at least the above average practitioners of heathen rituals would basically on the to-do list of every religious organization bent on enforcing 100% believers.
The belief that witchcraft is effective was probably just something that "everybody knows". I guess that the bible is at least ambivalent on the effectiveness. I mean, Exodus 22:18 does not command you to make fun of witches for their beliefs that they can influence the Divine Creation with the help of rituals which obviously don't work, it just tells you to kill them. (Per Wikipedia, the medieval church doctrine denied witchcraft, but in the early modern period, but became at least more ambivalent in the early modern era. A 'small ice age' leading to worse agricultural outcomes may have played a role?)
I think that all societies have had some people trying to cast spells to harm others. Probably happened in 1000 BCE, 1000 CE, 1500 CE and 2000 CE. This does not explain why the church was mostly chill about it in 1300 CE, but started persecuting it much more harshly towards 1600 CE. Or why witch-hunts became so popular in this period.
This paragraph quoted from the malleus maleficarum "[the devil] assumed body of a man, and urges them to keep faith with him, promising them worldly prosperity and length of life; and they recommend a novice to his acceptance... and when the disciple asks what more must be done, the devil demands the following oath of homage to himself: that she give herself to him, body and soul, for ever..."
this sounds like a version of something that does happen today in spiritual communities and cults and made me wonder about the possibility of a man (or whoever, but it says man here) claiming to be a devil to attract followers and power, and most especially young women who will do anything you tell them to.
I assume cult dynamics are widely applicable. I haven't studied the Malleus Maleficarum enough to judge how much of its detail might be descriptively accurate, but it's at least possible that, yes, that's what some cult leaders said.
There is one documented case of a Satanist cult killing a bunch of people to fuel their rituals - Adolfo Constanzo's gang in 1980s Mexico. However, they were
- a pre-existing criminal gang
- following a unique brand of nonsense invented by Constanzo, not any sort of pre-existing tradition
- fairly rapidly caught, with absolutely tons of physical evidence, as soon as they targeted a civilian
We can compare this to the similarly well documented false accusations of random innocents during the Satanic Panic around the same time. Medieval witch trials pretty much invariably resemble the second type - people, frequently under duress, frequently small children, making wild physically-impossible claims under prompting from authority focus with zero physical evidence to support any aspect of them.
It's not true that the trial records invariable contain unrealistic material. But even it were, it's perfectly possible that the unrealistic material was added as "piling on." That would not preclude the possibility that some were engaged in practices that both they and their opponents understood as witchcraft.
For example, there's plenty of literary evidence that practices of cursing were common in antiquity. Is it likely that all such things just suddenly stopped in the early Middle Ages?
Invoking the example of various panics tells us very little. This is a mistaken form of reasoning. Henry Kissinger once said, "Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you." Likewise, the presence of false allegations is not evidence that there are no true allegations.
Just to bring up the alternate hypothesis: magic exists; malicious magic directed to harm others exists; and spirits that desire to entrap people into using same, to their ultimate detriment, exist.
(None of which is to say that Kramer had either a complete, or a wholly true, idea of how all this worked.)
To the obvious rejoinder about provability, I will note that there's no reason why a malicious spirit that is directly granting supernatural powers to someone should *want* to make its existence and its methods clearly understandable to large numbers of humans. And such a spirit would not be bound by the "single simple rule that applies in all times and all places" principle that the scientific method presupposes.
Note that a malicious spirit *also* wants to be malicious to those that it has given power to. Because, in the end, it wants to tear *everyone* down. That is, it's using people. So it wouldn't want witches that can perfectly avoid detection as well. In fact, it's playing both sides, both the ones accusing people of being witches AND the people actually making pacts. Because both serve its purpose of causing strife and murder and malice.
"there's no reason why a malicious spirit...should *want* to make ...its methods clearly understandable"
There was a fantasy book I read ages ago (the title escapes me) that had sorcerers controlling demons to do malevolence. [possible spoiler ahead] It was thought that every veteran summoner eventually got careless with complex runes but the last scene was an, er, boss demon explaining that it was all a deception - an excuse to cause wanton destruction and then surprise the 'controller' at the height of his career!
A spirit must be bound by *some* limitations, unless you want to argue that it's literally omnipotent. The lack of cooperation makes it harder to discover those rules, but not impossible, given enough effort and opportunities.
You could think of it like learning about the enemy's weapons in war - sure, the enemy isn't going to *tell* you a single simple rule like "To blow up our tanks, just hit the top armor with a Javelin missile," but those rules derive from deeper physical laws like "steel armor is heavy and a tank can't carry too much of it on top." Your enemies aren't omnipotent, so you can learn about those deeper laws, and come up with ways to test your hypotheses even if they don't cooperate - "Since the top armor of a tank is thinner, let's make a missile that hits from the top."
Likewise, unless evil spirits are omnipotent and merely feigning weakness to toy with us, there must be some laws about what they can and can't do - when they can and can't lay curses, when they can or can't be bound and exorcised - and one would expect that over hundreds of years of trial and error that witches and witch hunters would have developed some testable hypotheses.
They are, however, entirely capable of just not doing anything clearly supernatural in any provable context, such that systematic investigators mostly come to the conclusion that witches don't exist. This conclusion is of course convenient for the spirits in question.
It's also inconvenient, because they can't take any actions that might reveal themselves, and they get more and more restricted as things like cell phone cameras become ubiquitous. They're basically backing themselves into a "god of the gaps" situation.
This would also be vulnerable to covert observation - if the spirit isn't omniscient, then it doesn't *know* if it's leaving provable evidence of the supernatural or not, because it doesn't know what we know. You could, say, put a few hidden cameras in a witch's house to catch a spirit manifesting in front of her when it thinks she's alone.
(That would be a neat fantasy novel scenario - witch hunters never actually caught any witches or banished any spirits, but they investigated so thoroughly that the spirits don't dare affect the real world just in case they get caught.)
There are quite a few steps between "omniscient" and "capable of being caught out by trivial human measures such as hidden cameras".
Also, there's plenty of measures available that wouldn't trip the "obviously supernatural" flag, especially given modern civilization's immovable ideological prior against anything supernatural existing. If it's a one-off event, a spirit could do almost anything, and get caught on camera, and the reaction of everyone not directly involved will still be "meh, probably nothing".
Concrete example: suppose there is an actual witch, who does like Kramer says they often do, and buries a charm under someone's doorstep to inflict debilitating magic illness. How does the modern world react? Random, mysterious nasty illness is downright routine and would get dismissed; even if the charm is removed and the illness vanishes, that is also routine and would get dismissed; and you could have the witch confess on camera and film the whole process, and it would just vanish into the noise online. Just as Scott supposes that the medieval world would generate lots of reports of witches even if witches didn't exist, it seems clear that the modern world would ignore all reports of witches, even if they did.
My speculation about evil spirits would include, as you say, *some* limitations. There would have to be some laws/restraint keeping them from wrecking the place completely. Are these laws knowable and usable by humans? Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy(1945) thought so(search "occult"). Is it ever a good idea to experiment with poorly understood powerful forces that have some sort of consciousness and are characterized by deception and malevolence? It's like toying with atomic power except the atoms don't like you.
There's an interesting contrast with "Cautio Criminalis", written in 1631 by Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld. Like Kramer, Spee affirms that witches exist and that their crime is the worst possible. However, he argues that almost all accusations are false and the trials are a farce. I'd love to read a review of this work, as a counterpart to "Malleus Maleficarum".
As a sample, here is Question XV: Who in particular are the people who continually incite the rulers against witches?
Spee identifies four groups. First, theologians and prelates who are detached from the real world, "happy in their own speculations and little museums". Some of them are so inexperienced in the affairs of men that they can fall prey to misinformation they read or they can regard the courts as sacrosanct and incapable of error. Trusting the judgement of the courts, they inevitably conclude that "everything is full of witches" and "this plague must be crushed". Second, the lawyers who have gradually noticed that witch trials are lucrative and as a result have suddenly become very pious. Third, the "ignorant and usually jealous and malicious common folk" who "avenge their feuds through defamation" and also accuse the authorities of witchcraft if those authorities don't seize and torture the targets of their defamation. Fourth, people who try to avoid suspicion by making accusations, perhaps because they themselves are witches. Spee notes that the set of denunciations often cycles back round to the first accuser (who then confesses) and so either innocent people are confessing, or making an accusation should be treated as highly suspicious.
A good job none of these four groups has any contemporary analog!
Hooray! I came to drop the cautio criminalis comment and I see I have been beaten to the punch!! My understanding is that Spee’s book was more highly regarded among practicing witch hunter, a witchhunters witchhunter if you will, and MM was seen as somewhat sensational, in part because of the penis-stealing focus.
You are more likely to be struck by lightning or hit by a comet, than to be falsely accused of witchcraft.
People who spend too much time publicly worrying about false accusations of witchcraft probably have an agenda. I would not be surprised to find that most of them already made their own contracts with the Devil.
Arthur Miller compared the Red Scare to the witch trials, but he didn't believe witches existed, whereas there really were agents of the Soviet Union operating in the US (and of course the Second World of communist governments itself existed in a way that Satan didn't).
Yeah, the Crucible is a great play if read literally as being about the Salem Witch Trials and human nature but is just garbage as a parable for HUAC and the Army-McCarthy hearings since Communists are real and witches aren't.
Didn't McCarthy have something like a 10% rate of the people he accused of being Commies actually being Commies? There were certainly a bunch of Soviet agents, but McCarthy in particular wasn't doing much better than chance.
I've seen a credible claim, but I forget where so the credibility is obviously noncommutative, that *every* person accused by McCarthy of witchcraft, I mean Communism, on every version of his list, was in fact a Soviet agent.
There are some that we know were definitely Soviet agents (due to Venona decrypts mentioning them), some that we're pretty sure were *not* Soviet agents (due to, again, Venona decrypts mentioning them) and a lot that AFAIK we've got no particular evidence on.
You could argue, I suppose, that a lot of the people we don't have evidence on could have been undetected Commies, but literal 100% either way doesn't make sense.
There were a lot of Soviet agents in the US (and British) governments in that era, but we later learned who most of them were. McCarthy, IIRC, did slightly better than chance in identifying Soviet agents, and the cases where it quickly became clear he was just making stuff up, discredited the hard work other people were doing to identify Soviet agents in the US government and even the idea that there *were* any significant number of such.
I don't think McCarthy was actually a Soviet agent himself, but a clever spymaster would probably want to have someone like him doing that sort of work on the other side.
The play "The Crucible" does include a character that actually is a witch, in the sense that she attempts to perform a magic ritual; her getting caught is one of the things that starts the search for other witches, of which there were none.
> Did you know you can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum? You can go into a bookstore and say “I would like the legendary manual of witch-hunters everywhere, the one that’s a plot device in dozens of tired fantasy novels”. They will sell it to you and you can read it.
Oh yes. Further, they wrote less books back then so it's easier to get an overview.
> Witches are worse than Jews, because Jews never claimed to be Christian. But witches were once Christian and then renounced the faith.
This is a fairly common argument. One Christian theologian, for example, argued that non-Christians from non-Christian countries should not be discriminated against while heretics should be. Likewise people who had immigrated or conquered were not supposed to be blamed for their faith in the same way as local converts. Islam actually codifies this: heretics or apostates go to hell while people who are simply not Muslim might still be righteous (though not as righteous as if they were Muslims). And Jewish apostates are poorly thought of while gentiles can be moral so long as they follow certain rules.
> Theory 1, Kramer made everything up. I don’t want to completely discount this. [...] Theory 2, Kramer is faithfully reporting a weird mass hallucination that had been going on long before he entered the picture.
Theory 3: Humans inherently make sense of the world by creating metaphysical phenomenon that have are meta-explanations with loose grounding in material reality and if you focus on these phenomenon, rather than the material reality underlying them, you will end up with coherent but false worldviews. Our ability to manifest these metaphysical phemomenon both allows us to organize beyond our social groups and is a function, perhaps a necessary one, of our ability to theorize and pattern match. Kramer had a series of true phenomenon such as cow murders and pattern matched them to a metaphysical theory about magic.
The idea that he was either lying or dealing with liars ignores there may have been a reality, even if a misunderstood one.
Yeah, it seems more and more like humans have this reflex to blame bad things on malicious people or malevolent abstract entities (or the victims themselves), when the actual causes are complex interactions involving many people, many of whom can be completely unaware.
"Moloch" in retrospect seems like a playful attempt to posit an abstract entity responsible for a class of problems that many people didn't even notice was a class.
Witches did most certainly exist in the time of the Malleus Maleficarum.
Of course they did not have the magical powers that have been attributed to them. But they had social power and power to frighten. Think of them like the Voodoos in Africa. They can have real effect on peoples lives due to those people believing the curses are real. So they manifest the negative on themselves. Same with witches.
Even now we have decent sized groups of Wiccans. Most who practice harmless rituals. But some who use social pressures and effects to mess with their enemies or modify society. Are they a serious threat? Hmm probably not. But they do exist.
I am pretty new to ACX - only been a month or so. Not sure what you mean by every post is one step away from AI x-risk? That makes no sense. If the story is about AI then fair enough. But this one had zero to do with AI in any way. So I thought it was an odd step for the commenter to take to try to change the discussion.
Pretty odd connection though. Because an actual sentient AI that takes control of the world will not be playing into the hands of any human. So it does not seem rational for the creators of it to be building it because they think it will give them control over people and society. It will not. They will be controlled by the AI just like the people they may have sought to control.
So I really think it is a step too far and not really relevant to this conversation - which I am well in my right to question if someone goes of track.
This was a plotline over a couple of episodes of Star Trek: Voyager (bad show, but I liked these episodes).
Someone sets up a holodeck program simulating a medieval Irish village. It is left running on a permanent basis, and the omnipresent background mischief of space causes it to start going wrong. The programming safeguards -- that normally prevent the simulated villagers from noticing anything that wouldn't fit their reality -- fail. And there's quite a lot of stuff going on that doesn't fit the normal functioning of a medieval Irish village, so the villagers get more and more freaked out.
Eventually they accuse the crew members of being witches or spirits. The evidence is overwhelming. (And, frankly, the accusation is essentially correct!) But here's some of the testimony:
> MILO: So, I said to young Harry, I'm not one for rainy days and grey skies. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, he called up the spirits to do his bidding. A second later, there wasn't a cloud in the sky.
> EDITH: I was up near Ballahick Farm with little Mary. She was playing near the well. Somehow, she lost her footing and fell in. I was so frightened I didn't know what to do. So I ran to the Colbys to get some help. But when we returned, there was Mary in the meadow talking with Katie O'Clare. There wasn't a scratch on her. Katie said I must've been mistaken when I saw her fall. There was no mistake.
> GRACE: Last Sunday, after his sermon, I saw Father Mulligan vanish into thin air.
These are most certainly the actions of people with supernatural powers. But their sheer non-malevolence is called out by another villager seeking to defend the crew:
> Katie showed me things that are beyond our comprehension. They have machines that I can't begin to describe, but not once have they used them against us. Quite the opposite, in fact.
> Milo, you said you didn't like the rain and young Harry Kim made it go away.
> Edith Mulcahey herself said that Katie O'Clare pulled her daughter from the well and out of harm's way.
> These are not the deeds of spirits and mischief makers.
Oh, I hate those episodes. It's the Fairhaven episodes, and it's not even a mediaeval village, that makes it worse.
It's late 19th/early 20th century Ireland, allegedly, because they have trains and there's talk of revolution in the air. The setting looks like it's on the east coast, Janeway's character is supposedly to come from the south-west, which is also seemingly only a hop, skip and jump away, and there's also confusion with the west coast.
The elements are all *terrible* and it's precisely the kind of "people who know nothing of history or the context invent a Hollywood version of diddley-aye leprechaun top o' the mornin' Ireland" that you would expect.
The defender is probably Janeway's love interest? Whom she deliberately meddled with the original characterisation to get rid of his wife (murder!) and make him more appealing to her tastes and more likely to fall in love with her, which can't be said to be "not once have they used their machines against us". 😁
Oh yeah. Funnily enough it was full of tiny details that they obviously attempted to get right, like having the name of the train station be in both Irish and English.
Then they invented the worst "pig in the parlour stereotypes" 🙄 I was particularly cross about the church, because the interior looked like the Gallarus oratory - all damp stone. That's not what a 19th century/20th century Irish Catholic church interior would have looked like *at all*.
This video is like it was uploaded via a bucket, but about 4:38 in is their idea of what a priest preaching a homily in a Catholic church of the time would be like:
> Funnily enough it was full of tiny details that they obviously attempted to get right, like having the name of the train station be in both Irish and English.
Huh. Would that have been the case prior to independence?
> The defender is probably Janeway's love interest? Whom she deliberately meddled with the original characterisation to get rid of his wife (murder!) and make him more appealing to her tastes and more likely to fall in love with her, which can't be said to be "not once have they used their machines against us".
Yes, all of that is correct.
I have no particular attachment to the details of the geography of Ireland. But I do like the illustration of "when my daughter fell into a well, Katie rescued her" being used as evidence to condemn Katie to death.
We can generalize the observation to explain why intelligence is not considered a trait that is generally to be admired. An intelligent person is a better friend and also a more effective enemy; whether a person's intelligence is good or bad depends on how they feel about you! Which means that many people correctly view intelligence in others as dangerous and frightening.
When I worked in cybersecurity, people's stories of telling other people what they did for a living fell into two very distinct camps:
1. "How cool! Is it like in the movies?"
2. Becoming visibly uncomfortable and trying to avoid speaking to the person in the future.
Yeah, but that wasn't "Katie pulled my daughter out of the well", it was "When I came back, there was no well and Katie told me I imagined the whole thing".
Put yourself in the place of being told that "that thing you remember never happened, look, there isn't even that building that you said was there". We call it 'gaslighting' now, and it's not held to be well-intentioned on the part of the person doing it, or beneficial for the recipient of it.
"Katie got a rope and pulled my daughter out" is something within the bounds of physical reality. "Katie made the well disappear" is not, and is going to look like magic.
The well didn't disappear. It was still there. The (false) claim was that the girl never fell in, not that there never was a well.
Denying that you have done something that isn't allowed, such as using sorcery, is the baseline expectation. No one is going to be surprised when a witch claims that a magical result can be explained by some other means.
Put yourself in the place where you receive an anonymous (correct) tip that your daughter is appearing on a porn site, but when you ask all your friends, to a man they deny any knowledge of the videos or the tip. You're positive one of them is lying. Does that matter to you? Would you expect anything different?
"The elements are all *terrible* and it's precisely the kind of "people who know nothing of history or the context invent a Hollywood version of diddley-aye leprechaun top o' the mornin' Ireland" that you would expect."
This smacks of anti-Darby O'Gill And The Little People bigotry! Disgusting! Next you'll try to tell us Brigadoon isn't a documentary.
Since this was in the time of the Protestant Reformation, the king (James VI) was Presbyterian (and explicitly had been raised as such, his mother the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots having been faced with rebellions by the Protestant noblemen of her reign) then prayers to the saints *would* have been considered by the clergy and nobles of the time as magic, Papist superstition which was itself devil-worship.
The North Berwick witch trials were complicated by the background history of the rebellions against Mary, the murders committed by Scottish noblemen, the interference with James' upbringing by said noblemen determined to create a God-fearing Protestant king who would respect the limits of his authority over them, and attempts on James' life.
Belief that witches could raise storms then met the perfect opportunity in the storms which prevented his betrothed Anne, princess of Denmark, from crossing over to Scotland. James then sailed to meet her, but also met with storms on the way back. This triggered gossip and rumours in Denmark about possible witchcraft, sparked by the witch trials happening in Germany at the time, and thus trickled down to Scotland and "are people trying to kill the king?" Since there had been at least one attempt on his life, and since anti-Catholicism was ongoing, this easily morphed into "are Catholics trying to kill the king? trying to do it by witchcraft?"
The Danes had held their own witch trials about the storms preventing Anne from sailing to Scotland, and had convicted and burned women for it. So James set up his own tribunal.
And of course, if you're a midwife (a suspicious profession because of abortion, still births and potions to prevent conception or bring about miscarriages) who uses Catholic prayers and charms (superstitious magic) that makes you the perfect suspect for a witch-hunt, true or not.
Weird how no major businesses or governments take advantage of the mystical power of sorcery. Must be thanks to the incredible religiosity of modern states, so that in deference to God they refuse to consort with devilish power.
None of this is to suggest that magic actually works in a supernatural sense, simply that a great deal of people - including those in positions of great power and influence within polite secular society - seem to believe it's useful, erroneously or otherwise.
There's a big difference between "I'm selling you witchcraft" (obvious - I'll sell any damn thing) or "I'm using witchcraft to pick my stocks or acquisitions" (which anyone can *claim* to work, since throwing darts at a board is better than your average investor) and "I'm using witchcraft to make your dick not work, so I can sell you Viagra."
Not sure what you are on about. I literally stated that witches do indeed exist. There is a thriving Wiccan community in most countries. And a small percentage of those people are in it for personal gain and dark reasons. They have no magic - so if you mean witches that fly around on brooms and turn people into newts don't exist then no kidding.
Millions of non magical witches that can and do curse and spell people and some people are gullible enough to believe the magic is real so it works on them. It is the same as Placebo in medicine.
In the 90s Russia I saw plently of apparently completely serious ads offering curse-removal services. This sort of thing seemed to have about the same level of reputation as astrology and divination.
Yep. Even though it beggars belief there are still millions of people that believe in astrology and divination and curses. Scary in this day and age with our level of education and understanding of the universe.
And 90s Russia was a pretty chaotic and miserable place (capitalism just became an excuse for widescale looting and gangsters rose to power), another parallel with our medieval peasant village...
There is apparently a Witches Market in La Paz, Bolivia, where you can buy dried frogs and llama fetuses to use in witchcraft, or hire a witch of your own for some purpose
> You can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum. So, why haven’t you? Might the witches’ spiritual successors be desperate to delegitimize the only thing they’re truly afraid of - the vibrant, time-tested witch hunting expertise of the Catholic Church?
Ironic, since that very book was condemned by the Inquisition. The Church position is that millions of Satanists really can be wrong, they are all outweighed by the Church hierarchy.
The Malleus is fascinating for many reasons, but today I think it's most interesting in that its methodology is largely shared by the likes of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, the most popular of the woke "anti-racist" crowd. I addressed that in the first in a series of essays on their work (link to full essay below): "In their books, Kendi and DiAngelo appeal not to methods of proof, but to the methods explicated in another, similarly popular book written centuries ago – a book that also falsely assumed a specific ill intent was the cause of bad outcomes. That book was the Malleus Maleficarum (usually translated as the Hammer of Witches), a treatise on witchcraft … The policies advocated in the Malleus were implemented across Europe. The policies advocated in DiAngelo’s and Kendi’s books are just now starting to find their way into American law. Before they potentially become entrenched, it’s worth considering the similarities in the approach of these books, and how they diverge from the humanistic and Enlightenment values that helped end the witch hunts and usher in the conditions for human flourishing … Kendi has tweeted: “The heartbeat of racism is denial. And too often, the more powerful the racism, the more powerful the denial.” And DiAngelo also considers denials of racism proof of racism. As she writes in White Fragility, “None of the white people whose actions I describe in this book would identify as racist. In fact, they would most likely identify as racially progressive and vehemently deny any complicity with racism. Yet all their responses illustrate white fragility and how it holds racism in place.” The Malleus describes how a suspected sorceress should be questioned by her inquisitors, instructing them to “[n]ote that for the most part sorceresses initially make a denial [that sorceresses exists], and hence a greater suspicion arises than if they responded, ‘Whether they exist or not I leave to my betters.’” According to the Malleus, not only does a denial indicate guilt, but the only exculpatory response is the accused’s expression of deference to one’s “betters” among the clerisy’s academic elite -- whose doctrines posit the existence of witches. And similarly, as DiAngelo wrote in her dissertation, her “primary measure” of white racism is “the larger body of research in the Whiteness literature” – a Whiteness literature that posits omnipresent racism ..."
I mean, if you say "racism doesn't exist", that also would be treated as suspicious, and I've reasonably-frequently encountered recitals that this is evidence of being a racist.
I think I would (informally, outside of legal, especially criminal, contexts) probably treat a strong claim that "racism doesn't exist" as mild evidence towards some amount of racism, if it comes from a reasonably intelligent-seeming person.
That, or trolling.
That statement would, after all, only be true if there wasn't a single person in the entire world who harbored any beliefs of the "my race is inherently superior and of greater moral value than other race(s) X"-variety, which I have, to my own satisfaction, empirically verified to be untrue; in quite an obvious way.
That’s quite poor reasoning, given that many antiracists define racism as an omnipresent powerful system which conspires to oppress and gaslight others. A lot of people don’t believe in that.
If someone said "Racism doesn't exist" as a blanket statement, and then followed it up with "Well actually, when I said "racism," I meant "the broadest possible definition of racism in use, described in language that makes it sound like a conspiracy theory"" I don't think it would convince me that they were arguing in good faith.
(Side note - if anyone ever gets involved in this sort of discourse, using "systemic racism" to refer specifically to the broad power-structure stuff will save you a lot of hassle fighting over definitions.)
I agree that Godoth’s wording of the definition is questionable, but the point does sort of hold.
No doubt you’ve heard of “you can’t be racist against white people” which basically is saying that a power structure needs to be unbalanced for racism to be “real.” If you don’t think that the power system is unbalanced, then you could believe that no one is “racist” in that since, even if they were blatantly discriminatory. I’m not claiming it’s a good definitition, but it’s one that gets bandied about, and allows one to hold a “there’s no racism” via (what I would consider a little) naivete rather than actual racial preferences held by themselves
but the people using that definition when they say "racism" (without any qualifiers like "systemic") are, in from what I can remember of my experience, literally never the people who make an unqualified statement of "racism doesn't exist".
Unless, as I said, they're trolling. (Or I guess with an obvious implied "that kind of" in front.)
So I'll discard that argument for why it is "bad reasoning" as inapplicable, until I encounter one.
One could argue (from a Robin Hanson-esque) perspective that racism in the belief-sense doesn't exist in a meaningful way because such beliefs are always post-hoc and imaginary. What would exist, in this analysis, is in-group preference and cognitive bias, and various mistaken beliefs downstream from these two contain items such as "racism" ("my group is smarter, prettier, and funnier than all others") and "anti-racism" ("my group is morally culpable in a way not accessible to simple, childlike, innocent groups") are not "real" in any way that matters.
(Note that I do not imagine my two joke examples of what racism and anti-racism mean are all-inclusive. I can imagine someone saying, "Yes of course my group is the ugliest, dumbest, and most exploitable of all human groups which is why I hope the AI overlord will leave us alone after turning everyone else into paperclips -- fuck those guys" and I suppose we'd have to score that as 'genocidal racism'.)
Sort of fair using a non-literal reading of my comment; I very literally meant someone making a completely unqualified statement of "racism doesn't exist", not within some explanatory or assumed/implied context.
The view you describe here would be a pretty big qualifier and would definitely go against common usage.
It seems I once again misjudged people's tendency to take a comment that was intended very literally as less so, and/or my ability to convey the degree of intended literalness of a comment I write!
*updates*
(Actually, I did sort of expect at least one less-literal reading misjudging my intended meaning. Not saying you necessarily did, maybe you just wanted to make me aware of this slightly unusual possibility as to what "racism doesn't exist" could mean)
Heh, yes I meant the "one could argue" opening line as a marker for thought-experiments. All comments on the internet are just one person riffing off someone else's words, sometimes with the most tenuous of connections in terms of meaning or relevance.
However, I personally would receive "racism doesn't exist" as a strong clue that my interlocutor is unusually intelligent and probably means something interesting and clever. Even if I didn't know the sense meant I'd be excited to find out.
Ordinarily I hear only tired defenses or tired attacks. The lower levels of discourse are all people accusing each other of racism: the spectrum from "All whites are racist!" and "Trump hates Latinx people!" to "The Left has low expectations for black folk because they're paternalistic racists!" and "Democrats were the party of the KKK!" does not (generally) contain anything at all interesting or profound.
The only semblance is him quoting the disciples saying "If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry". So the author seems to have mistaken the quote for St John's words, and then the rest is just the author editorializing.
Various authors of his day, and perhaps he himself as well, I cannot quite recall, really did say inflammatory things about women, but only within the specific context of advocating celibacy (for men) generally and monasticism in particular. The same authors also wrote beautifully to and for women in the same way, sometimes favorably comparing the bridegroom Christ to mortal men, sometimes talking about the terrors of childbirth, etc. Taken out of context they could seem misandrist or antinatalist.
Ancient writers, especially the ones educated in the ancient rhetorical traditions, have to be read as a whole - or at least a chapter at a time, otherwise you end up with moronic misquoting (like the author of Malleus Maleficarum). Knowing that he was wrong about that, which was obvious and easy to reference, you wonder what he did with other sources.
You're completely right about the writings of church fathers about women and celibacy. St. John Chrysostom wrote some scathing things against women, and some really sweet things about women in relation to how husbands should treat their wives.
This post is a new favorite of mine—bizarre subject matter coupled with deep insights into human nature (with a gentle sense of humor throughout) is very much my jam :)
> His arguments ring hollow to modern ears, and honestly neither God nor the Devil comes out looking very good. God isn’t trying to maximize a 21st century utilitarian view of the Good, He’s trying to maximize His own glory. Allowing some evil helps with this, because then He can justly punish it (and being just is glorious) or mercifully forgive it (and being merciful is also glorious). But, if God let the Devil kill everyone in the world, then there would be no one left to praise God’s glory, plus people might falsely think God couldn’t have stopped the Devil if he’d wanted to. So the glory-maximizing option is to give the Devil some power, but not too much.
An interesting window in contemporary morality: God is vain and Devil is vengeful. And vice versa, I guess.
Just to be clear, "dormitive potency" is not false; we are aware of many such substances today.
The whole problem with "dormitive potency" is that it is an explanation which bears zero information, a canonical example of circular reasoning. "NyQuil puts you to sleep because it puts you to sleep" is a stupid thing to say, but that doesn't mean the premise, "NyQuil puts you to sleep," is false.
This kind of "explanation" was and is common in the medical field. When doctors do it to me, they tend to immediately point it out, as in 'we call this "desquamation", which just means "it's peeling",' or 'the condition is called "pruritis", which means "an itch".'
That could be because my personal affect suggests I won't be comforted by the simpler "you have pruritis", or because standards of how to deal with your patients have changed.
One thing I find missing here is an appreciation for how different the "physics" of the 1500s was from today. In that earlier world everyone knew that there were any number of spirits, sprites, demons, angels, and supernatural whatnot wandering around the world, and causing all kinds of mischief, and most of the weird coincidences that one came across. Things that went bump in the night could very easily be a werebear stumbling over a rake in the yard -- why not? Such things were known to exist in the forest, so-and-so had seen one, and besides it just made sense, everyone agrees such a thing might occur.
People just knew there were supernatural causes for all kinds of things, no doubt in part because that tradition had been handed down for generations, but probably also because people just naturally infer intelligence and motivation to complex processes they don't otherwise understand (the modern equivalent being the ease with which people infer intelligence and motivation to GPT-3, or the extreme ease with which people believe a computer can be programmed to think and feel just like us, cf. ELIZA and its -- embarassing, for us -- success).
In such a world, where supernatural causes flood the world, is it a stretch to believe that some people have found a way to use them to malignant ends? Of course not. Rather, it's as natural as breathing, as natural as (say) the modern tendency to believe that hackers can cause a nuclear war, because we all believe all computers can be subverted over the Internet, we heard a story about it for sure, and besides it just stands to reason, everyone knows such a thing is reasonable.
We owe a great debt to the Enlightenment thinkers, and to some extent the Church, who slowly between the two of them persuaded everyone that there *is* no zoology of spirits causing my keys to not be where I am 100% certain I left them, or my car to not start on the very morning I am late for an important appointment. The Church desired this end for its own reasons -- to reserve the supernatural to God alone -- and the scientists of the Enlightenment wanted it to be true that every effect could be explained by a mindless cause, the mechanism for which could be teased out, and ideally written down in equations.
They succeeded so well that these days we can laugh at the world in which supernatural causes were considered entirely plausible for everything from the dog's weird howling one night to our sister's untimely death when she'd been feeling just fine the day before. These days we believe -- with for the most part a no less unreasoning absorbed-in-our-mother's-milk type of blind faith as those of the 1500s believed the contrary -- that *every* strange thing we observe must have a purely physical explanation, that it has to be atoms and molecules doing something sciency which some big-brain could explain in a cool Youtube video -- and any contrary suggestion that it's spirits is just clearly silly.
This is a tremendous advance, not least of all in considerably reducing our ability to wreak cruel tribal vengeance on each other by invoking fears of malignant spiritual alliances -- of witchcraft. It's a pity we take it for granted as much as we do, and pretend it is some natural state of the human mind, some birthright, rather than an inheritance that was hard won by centuries of good thought and disciplined empiricism (and could easily be lost again).
That is a good point. I should have emphasized that for quite a lot of human beings, evil unseen forest spirits were part of the same continuum that included cats and ploughs and the Senate, without the modern sharp dividing line between them.
In modern D&D, there is an objective difference - the bears have creature type "animal" (and are subject to spells that only work on animals) while the owlbears have creature type "beast" (and aren't -- this is not a symmetrical situation; there are no spells that single out "beasts"). (There are bugbears, too, but those are "goblins", intelligent humanoids with no relation to bears.)
You can find quite a few people wondering what the in-world difference is supposed to be.
My assumption was always that they maintain themselves through some innate magic, whereas animals can get by on purely mundane means (I also lean towards that most magical creatures should be crippled by an anti-magic field, but that’s a bit heretical)
Even back in the ancient world they understood there was a difference. A human or regular animal couldn't do something while invisible, but a god or demon could. They understood that Jesus's miracles were something that no normal human could do without the help of god or demons. There was some intuitive understanding of the normalcy of experience and the physical world and some extra supernatural power only saints or witches could access.
Replace the word "supernatural" with "demonic" and the distinction becomes very understandable. (Or "angelic", or "divine", in the case of things that are good).
Things and events either are demon-related or they are not.
Some fairy tale creatures were actually understood to be demons or angels in a particular form. The concept of goblin/imp and that of demon overlapped. There was a theory that elves were those angels who had stayed neutral during the war in heaven. Merlin was the spawn of a demon, hence his extraordinary powers.
It's from the first line of HP Lovecraft's "Supernatural Horror in Literature:" "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." (https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss) Written in 1927, that text has had the same effect on horror literature that JRR Tolkien had on fantasy: the first sentence in particular has become a fundamental, core assumption that is not always articulated, and rarely challenged. To the best of my knowledge, the insight originates with HPL, which would make it less than a century old.
I was very interested to see it make its way to this particular article.
For the kids here, it was one of those geek in-jokes like 42 (from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and Monty Python in the later part of the twentieth century. Most people could pick out Jason and Freddy or Dracula and the Wolfman, but you didn't know who Cthulhu was unless you played D&D (or Call of Cthulhu) and read comic books.
>I remember my high school psychology class, how boggled I was when I learned lots of people often confess falsely, even when they’re not under torture or being pressured or anything
I'd like to see this one backed up. The false confession narratives I'm familiar with all involve significant pressure, or deceit, or deficient mental capacity, and usually all three.
Lots of people fall into one of the categories of being under pressure, deceived, mentally ill, seeking notoriety, or mentally deficient (including unusually suggestible). If you're suggesting that people who do not fall into these categories would not falsely confess, well, maybe, but there are enough people in those categories (and often people leading apparently normal lives!) to make false confession a serious social problem.
I don't think you read what I wrote carefully. Scott said, "lots of people often confess falsely, even when they’re not under torture or being pressured or anything." That's what I'm questioning. Is this the case?
This is an n of 1 and doesn't involve an actual false confession, but....
Several years ago, a friendly acquaintance of mine was murdered. At the day/time it happened, I was several miles away, in a suburb to the city I lived in. I was eating gyros with a friend. After I learned about the murder (the next day), I kept worrying and retracing my steps to assure myself I didn't do it.
To be clear, I didn't confess (because I didn't do it) but I had a tremendous sense of....not guilt, but fear that it was possible. I'm not sure exactly where that feeling came from, but it happens occasionally, where I think I might be guilty of doing something I know I didn't do.
And again, my experience doesn't prove anything. For all you know, I'm making the whole thing up. And even though I'm not, I don't count as "lots of people." But I can easily see something like that happening "a lot," maybe not frequently, but enough to be a thing.
Some guy, for weird psychological reasons, firmly believes that his penis has been stolen. But when a doctor or priest or whoever examines him, his penis is right there where it should be. Therefore he must have been cursed to falsely believe that his penis has been stolen.
Sommers is a curious cat: he kinda gives me "if Abraham Van Helsing was a real person" vibes. And quite learned despite everything: I tried reading his book on werewolves, but could hardly go a page without running into an extended, untranslated quotation in Latin, German, Italian, French, Greek..... 3smart5me.
I don't know if the whole "witch hunting" phenomenon can be understood without first looking at the phenomenon of witchcraft the world over. On this note, something I've read in several reliable sources but haven't looked into specifically: supposedly the early Iroquois had a belief that there were only two ways anyone could possibly die: either by drowning, or by being hexed by a witch. So whenever someone died (unless they drowned), it was blamed on witchcraft from an enemy tribe, which demanded blood reprisal. I do not know whether this belief existed alongside a parallel practice of witches actually attempting to hex people in enemy tribes.
Wow. This is truly grim. Fuck Henry Kramer and everyone who was like him. You're way more charitable to that misogynistic woman-hater than I am. I think when the witches stole his little penis they also got his every drop of wisdom and compassion he may have once possessed.
I believe that most of organized religion is an ancient nightmare from which humanity has yet to fully awaken.
And hundreds of millions of people still believe that evidence-free shit. They pray to god to help them get that promotion, or for their team to win the game on Saturday. They might as well pray to Santa, since god is just Santa Claus for adults. Ya know, the old dude keeping track of who's naughty and nice, with presents (Heaven) for the good and lumps of coal (Hell) for the bad. I always think if you're asking magical old white men for favors, why not pray to Gandalf or Dumbledore? They're equally fictional and powerless. . .
Real women died by the thousands because of superstitious ignorance and fear wrapped in a cloak of religion. And real women continue to die to this day because of patriarchal oppression wearing clerical robes -- anyone heard from Iran lately?
Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and almost all of the rest. . . . why don't you all go drown in the oceans of misdeeds and suffering you have caused for centuries. Full disclosure: your corpses will NOT be exonerated.
I know very well that in their modern, "kindler, gentler" incarnations, most religions are much more benign -- I helped out at a church pumpkin patch sale last weekend. And my sister teaches Sunday school at her church.
But this article focused on the very real harm -- torture and death, remember? -- that Church-inspired teachings helped enable. And women continue to suffer and sometimes die because of Church-inspired policy. And not just in Iran. I realize that readers here tend to be an overwhelmingly male group of smart, inside working techies, but restricted abortion access is an issue that threatens womens' health and their lives right now. And which social institution has had the most influence on depriving women of their right to make medical decisions about their own bodies? I'll give you a hint -- it starts with reli and ends in gion.
That experiment has been tried. The USSR was very actively anti-religion, and did its best to convert everyone to atheism. I wouldn't say the results support the notion that this produces a more moral and peaceful people.
Well then, let me take the radical feminist view that as a man, you get *no* say at *all* about abortion or women's bodies, even the male feminist support view. As a woman, I can have an opinion (even if, ironically, it's against abortion); as a man, you shut your patriarchal mouth up.
You can't be one of the 'good ones' because there are no good ones.
(Any system can find an oppressor class to define).
Huh. You don't suppose any thinking person -- and certainly no woman -- might for reasons other than brainwashing by her Svengali priest come to believe killing a baby in utero is wrong? Of course not. Naturally the only source for a woman's ethics would be the nearest male authority, right? Good thing women have you to protect them.
I am mostly agnostic on this issue, for all kinds of reasons, but I phrase it that way deliberately, because I think one ought to make the difficult choice with eyes wide open -- not shying away from what you're doing by wrapping it up in soothing metaphors. You're killing something, there is no question. It's a thing that, left to itself, would without question become a human being. We usually call those things "babies" and that is certainly what any mother who cherishes the life within her calls it. So we should be 100% clear on what we're doing -- even if, in the end, we decide that killing the baby is the right thing to do. I am not a blanket pacifist -- I agree sometimes killing is necessary, if always a black mark on our species. But I prefer to be crudely honest about what we're doing. I would use the same brutal phrasing if I were talking about euthanasia, or war, or capital punishment. We need to own these choices.
Just to maximize murkiness, Exodus 21:22 states that causing a miscarriage is punishable only by fine, along the lines of property damage, suggesting that unborn children are not people yet.
Oh, I hope I didn't interject too much intensity into this light-hearted, humorous just-n-time for Halloween discussion about the Church-sanctioned murders of women! I must have mis-read the room. . .
I mean, it's not like any women or girls are getting killed these days by religious zealots. . . .
Not just women, the witch craze was equal opportunity and men were accused and died as well. And even Kramer, who definitely had bats in the belfry, was constrained by the necessity to have a trial - you couldn't just rock up to a village, start sniffing out witches, and having a burning in the square as you liked.
I'd like to believe in the easy 60s notion of no guru, no method, no teacher, no religion, no pigs, no state, man, but I've seen too much of human nature. We give up religion. Fine. Men are still killing women for various reasons, and not because "My girlfriend is a witch".
Well, to be fair, that's mostly just because we're much more violent in general. In the US 89% of murderers are men[1]. But it's still the case that men mostly kill other men. In the US a male murderer kills another man 70% of the time and a woman 30% of the time. A female murderer kills another woman 25% of the time and a man 75% of the time. (That women more often kill a man is normally explained by the fact that most female murderers are killing a spouse or lover.)
The disparity in cross-sex murder is surprisingly (to me) not as lopsided as one might have naively imagined. In the US the number of women killed by men (1733) is about 3 times the number of men killed by women (515), which is not as much lower as I would have guessed. The women are definitely well into silver medal territory, but they're not completely failing to hold up their side of the sorrow.
Another strange thing: the sex disparity in offense is not uniform worldside. If we sort this list:
...there are 6 countries with a nontrivial number of murders in which women are more than 50% of the victims: Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Latvia, and Switzerland. What's up with the Asians? In India also we have 17,700 (41%) female victims, in Burma 3,100 (39%), Bangladesh 1,500 (37%).
Must be all the secret Catholics in East Asia, I guess, promoting violence against women.
The hypothesis I’ve heard is that as a society becomes more peaceful, the rate of guys murdering some random guy at a bar who offended them decreases faster than the rate of guys murdering their wife or girlfriend in a fit of jealousy, and therefore you end up with women being a higher fraction of murder victims the less overall murder you have.
Slightly surprised to see Latvia on that list; I thought they had a relatively high murder rate by European standards.
If we sort that list by total murder rate, Japan comes in at #201 (0.2/100k people), South Korea at #181 (0.9), New Zealand at #182 (0.9), and Switzerland at #195 (0.6), so the argument might work there.
But India comes in at #122 (3.5), Burma at #31 (15.2), and Bangladesh at #135 (2.7), which aren't unusually low rates of violence. The US is at #108 (4.7) for reference.
You are so close but actually every tragedy you describe happened because of defection from the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
Witch burnings? Protestants. The teaching of the magisterium is that witches and their powers do not exist.
Iran? They’re Muslims, a particularly odd variety of Arianism among other things. Wouldn't be happening (and doesn't) in the Church.
"Restricted abortion access is an issue that threatens womens' health"? The principle of double effect covers cases where there is an actual medical need. But you can't kill an unborn baby for no reason 😎.
You didn't mention the Spanish Inquisition, but it pioneered many modern standards of a fair trial.
When someone has the courage and bravery to come forward as a victim of having their genitals stolen by a witch, we ought to listen and believe them. I don't see any possible reason why a victim would lie about this, and honestly Henry Kramer was retraumatising these victims by demanding the level of testimony that he did.
Yeah, I'm not as antireligious as you are, but I thought he was a bit too easy on the witch-finders. (After all, witchcraft accusations occur in non-European cultures too.) They really did kill a lot of people, and it was similar to the things they did to Jews in medieval Europe, with some of the same themes (poisoning wells, etc.)
> Is a good guy with a witch the only way to stop a bad guy with a witch?
Basically the plot of Night Watch series right here. Highly recommended if you're into urban fantasy and long conversations about the nature of morality.
The movie was a total mess but it was also overflowing with style (a lot of which was _not_ in the books). Tekken scrying, gopnik sorcerers, light mages being the literal power grid company... a lot of wasted potential there.
Night Watch is alright but has a definite "all edge and no point" vibe to it. I'd probably love it back in high school, as an adult I found it grating.
Now I’m confused. I read the damn book a long time ago and all I remember is that witches definitely stole penises en masse and kept them (as pets, I guess) happily chirping away in little birds’ nests?
I think the correct modern day comparison for the Malleus Maleficarum is clearly a legal brief of some kind, maybe one prepared by somebody at the CIA or FBI to offer background and a legal theory to justify some program for taking action against terrorists or something.
The first few sections make empirical and theological arguments that witches exist and are a real problem. My understanding is that for most of the middle ages witchcraft was viewed as kind of a folk superstition and treated pretty skeptically by the more respectable people. See Dante classifying it as a brand of deception, Charlemagne prescribing the death penalty for witch-hunters on the grounds that witches and witch-hunters both believe in witchcraft. Both of those were significantly earlier, but I think it still suggests that the theological arguments he's making are relevant for persuading skeptical readers. It doesn't necessarily go without saying that the church authorities think real witchcraft is even a thing.
Then he establishes that witches are actually a species of heretic, and thus under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. That's why the comparisons to Jews, and Pagans, and other types of heretics are relevant. This is also a reason for the emphasis on the idea that the witches gain their powers by explicit pacts with the Devil in order to subvert Christianity. If they were just casting curses, that would be a civil issue. If they're casting curses because they want to destroy the faith, then it's a job for the Inquisition.
Having argued for a potentially skeptical audience that witches are a real problem, and within the jurisdiction of the Inquisition as an institution devoted to suppressing heresy, he outlines his recommended procedures for dealing with the problem.
Now I'm imagining Colin Powell's UN speech except he is holding up a silvered glass bottle reputed to contain a witch (Pitt Rivers Museum object 1926.6.1).
> The Holy Inquisition is forbidden to burn anyone as a witch until they confess with their own lips, and confessions obtained under torture don’t count. THIS IS AN EXTREMELY FAKE RULE. The first way it is fake: a confession obtained under torture doesn’t count, but you can torture the witch, let her confess during the torture, and then later, after the torture is over, say “Okay, you confessed, so obviously you’re a witch, please confirm”. If she doesn’t confirm, you can torture her more and repeat the process. The second way it is fake is that you are allowed to lie to her in basically any way to make her confess. Kramer recommends saying “If you confess, I won’t sentence you to any punishment”. Then when she confesses, you hand her over to a different judge for the sentencing phase, and he sentences her to the punishment. Or a judge can promise mercy, “with the mental reservation that he means he will be merciful to himself or the State, for whatever is done for the safety of the State is merciful”.
Ignoring the parts about torture, this is a good description of the American justice system today: you can't punish someone unless they confess first[1], and you are allowed to tell a suspect whatever lies you feel like, including false promises of leniency, in order to trick them into confessing.
[1] Technically possible, but if I'm remembering right, more than 95% of American convictions are plea bargains.
In theory not any more, but certainly in the 1920s there was the belief in the use by police of beating confessions out of suspects:
From "The Mistake of the Machine", 1914 Father Brown story:
"Flambeau and his friend the priest were sitting in the Temple Gardens about sunset; and their neighbourhood or some such accidental influence had turned their talk to matters of legal process. From the problem of the licence in cross-examination, their talk strayed to Roman and mediaeval torture, to the examining magistrate in France and the Third Degree in America."
"The beating of suspects with rubber hose, blackjacks or other weapons to induce confession is a widespread practice in the Police Department and is largely due to failure to use legitimate detective methods with success, according to city Magistrate Joseph E. Corrigan."
"One mystery in interrogation law is why American police, but not English police, developed the highly coercive “third degree” tactic. One explanation is a coarsening of the American culture that did not happen, at least to the same degree, in England. The Civil War put Americans face-to-face with death and destruction to a degree never before seen in human history. Americans became indifferent to suffering when it was happening to those perceived as “the other.” American cities grew dense and dangerous during this period. Handguns were easily available. Organized crime infiltrated our cities and our police forces. The Black Hand, an early form of organized crime, resisted normal methods of solving crime. Getting a confession became an appealing shortcut. Drawing largely on newspaper archives, the chapter presents vivid accounts of police third degree, sometimes called “sweating.” The third degree largely disappeared by 1940 due to increasing public awareness and condemnation; moderating or declining crime rates; the advent of more scientific methods to solve crimes, such as the lie detector; and increasing police professionalism, best exemplified by the FBI."
"Police interrogations weren't always so complex. Until the early 1900s in the United States, physical abuse was an acceptable (if not legal) method of getting a confession. Confessions obtained by "third degree" techniques -- deprivation of food and water, bright lights, physical discomfort and long isolation, beating with rubber hoses and other instruments that don't leave marks -- were usually admissible in court as long as the suspect signed a waiver stating the confession was voluntary. Between the 1930s and 1960s, though, a crackdown on police tactics gradually changed the practice of interrogation.
While the Supreme Court had ruled as early as 1897 against involuntary confessions, it was in 1937 that things really started to change. In the case Brown v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court threw out a "voluntary" confession that was obtained after police officers repeatedly strung a suspect up in a tree and whipped him. The Court's decision was clear: Confessions obtained by force cannot be used as evidence at trial. By the 1950s, confessions were considered involuntary not only if police beat the suspect, but also if they held a suspect for an unnecessarily extended period of time, deprived him of sleep, food, water or bathroom facilities, promised some benefit if the suspect confessed or threatened some harm if he didn't."
> while American cops can't (in theory) torture people, they can absolutely keep interrogating someone for 14 hours until they feel that confessing is their only way out.
I feel that this is in fact an important distinction, where the American system is better than the other one.
Sorry, I don't think I understand what you're trying to say.
Early Modern English obviously had rules (perhaps not entirely standardized) of grammar beyond "use a bunch of French." Sure, there were differences between dialects, but I've yet to see an example of "thou shall" that doesn't just look like a typo.
Anyway, Scott's writing in Modern English, not Early Modern English, and when he wrote "Thou Shall [sic] Have Witches In [sic] Heaven" he seemed to be alluding to Matthew 19:21 "thou shalt have treasure in heaven" (with "treasure" changed to "riches," which I don't think you'd find in any translation that uses "thou").
Scott made a typo, and it is jarring. Even if he were attempting to use some uncommon grammatical construct like "thou shall" from Early Modern English, it would sound weird.
It is easy to dismiss "thou shall" as a typo because the only instances of it that I can find are surrounded in the same text, often on the same page, by a lot more instances of "thou shalt," not because I'm some naïve modern reader.
Whether someone explicitly told people to say "thou shalt" and not "thou shall" back then or not, the rule today is to use "thou shalt" and the intuitive (but apparently never explicitly enforced) rule back then seems to have been almost universally "thou shalt."
I bet, in a lot of the educated Early Modern English-speaking world you'd get weird looks if you went about saying "thou shall" all the time. Even if that's not true, I might give you weird looks if you say "thou shall" today when we have clear and explicit grammar rules telling you to not do that, especially if you are, as Scott is, alluding to a passage that explicitly uses "thou shalt."
> In fact, the word for woman in Latin is femina, which can also have the form feminus, which is literally just fe minus (lesser in faith)!
Apparently Kramer did reason this way, but "fe" for faith is a Romance innovation (entirely Iberian as far as I know). The Latin for "in faith" in this sense would be "fide" (using the ablative of respect, or maybe some other ablative).
There's no classical Latin parse for "fe" by itself (and Wiktionary says that the -d- was originally there in PIE, predating Latin, so dropping it is entirely post-classical, not classical or pre-classical).
Speaking of incubi and succubi... Carl Sagan in his book The Demon Haunted World compared stories about incubi and succubi to stories about alien abudctions and finds similarities between the forms of the stories. He uses this to argue that there's Something Going On psychologically that gets explained using the tropes of the times. Of course, it could just be evidence that the aliens have been at it for a very, very long time.
I can't *quite* recallI whether it was these or (also?) other demons/malicious supernatural entities who, in many accounts, are actually described as "sitting on a person's chest" at night, and preventing them to move.
Also, iirc it's quite common for people in sleep paralysis to see hypnagogic imagery bleeding into what they see of the waking world, sometimes leading to things like seeing shadowy humanoids.
I've basically settled on "yep, almost certainly sleep paralysis interpreted within a pre-scientific worldview" as the Something Going On Psychologically.
What's the story with witches asking for the red-hot iron trial? Was there common knowledge of this kind of thing being milder and more likely to result in exoneration than whatever was the formal alternative?
I read a theory that the priest administering a trial by ordeal had some degrees of freedom in terms of how they administered it - how hot you make the iron, how long you make them hold it, stuff like that - so if you were on good terms with the priest maybe it was a good way to prove your innocence.
Don't know if there's any historical support for it, but it was an interesting idea.
At least as I was taught it in college (and Wikipedia seems to say the same), the trial of red hot iron didn’t demand being able to hang onto the iron. They’d bandage the hand and then check a few days later to see if the burn was healing cleanly (God showing that the subject was in His good graces) or was festering (not).
The professor noted that the waiting time was usually short enough to preserve some ambiguity, but long enough that the community would have had time to mull the case and (though he didn’t express it this way) prime confirmation bias re whether the burn looked like it was totally on the road to recovery, or clearly turning bad.
Of course this vision of the ordeal as an informal jury trial kind of elides the part where suspects, innocent and guilty alike, are burned by red hot iron before it’s determined they’ve done anything wrong. (An earlier instance of “you can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride”.)
If you're innocent, and believe that trial by ordeal is a real thing that works, then obviously you'll want a trial by ordeal! God can be trusted to see your innocence, human courts can't!
(I've seen it speculated that this was, in fact, implicitly the point - the ordeals would frequently be rigged to let anyone who underwent them off, because the people who request them must be REALLY confident in their innocence to pick up what they think is a red-hot iron or whatever. And then everyone sees them "miraculously" unscathed, reinforcing belief in the system. Belief in witchcraft that can magically rig the test would legitimately corrupt this mechanism.)
Sorry for the derail, but: the part about "witchcraft is the worst evil, and everyone needs to put down everything else and take up the fight against witchcraft" made me think, is there actually more evidence for "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" now, than there was for witchcraft back then? It really doesn't look like we've progressed all that much when it comes to epistemology and choosing the most urgent issues.
I think this is an unproductive framing. There is evidence for some racism, and whether it is "systemic" or not is an annoying debate about how you define "systemic" which nobody will ever win. I think this is pretty different from the situation around witchcraft where as far as I know nobody has ever successfully cast a spell, and possibly (again, not sure of this) nobody even tried to be a witch.
No, they exclude certain possible causes from the list of considerations, because the mere act of considering them remotely plausible is itself evidence of racism on the part of the proposer.
"as far as I know, nobody has ever successfully cast a spell" - does this count? "I don't have any friends who are cool enough to have gone through the whole procedure for summoning your Holy Guardian Angel, but from what I read, completing the ritual directly does tend to leave you with an angel who hangs around you and gives you advice. I believe the people who say this is their experience of completing the ritual."
Note that the distinction between "what's going on in your mind" and "what's going on in the material world" wasn't as relevant back then as it is to rationalists in this day and age.
There literally exist organised political groups who will happily say they think that white people are superior. They have rallies, forums, etc. As far as I'm aware there were no rallies of witches in the streets of Gothenburg. Given the existence of public groups its not unreasonable to think that there may be people with similar beliefs who aren't running around burning things. And that they are likely to have an effect on society and the outcomes of different groups. You can reasonably argue about how common they are and how much to attribute to them vs other factors but saying they don't exist at all is facile
I am not saying they don't exist at all. That would be just as ridiculous as saying there were no witches back then. If you search for five minutes, you can find people claiming to practice witchcraft today, with gatherings, forums, covens and orders and all that jazz. And they often reference treatises on various aspects of magic from the late middle ages and the renaissance. So I am sure that there was an occult underground scene going on, and I am sure that there were people (mostly women) who knew about herbs and knew how to cook up psychedelic concoctions, and I am sure that there were lunatics who cursed other people, who probably suffered from some massive nocebo effects as a result. But these aspects did not combine into some massive conspiratorial evil that must be stopped at all costs.
The theory that witchcraft is still an extant practice in the form of Bolshevism has long been known to those who pay attention to such matters. But Bolshevism was just the beginning of it. The death of the unholy trinity of the Witch Kings Stalin, Hitler and Mao who fueled their reign with mad blood rituals have given way to the subtle, yet infinitely more insidious evil of Socialism. We do not recognize it as such, for it has infiltrated the Western World so deeply, that we do not recognize it. No wonder this, since fish too, will when put to question, reliably fail to accurately describe the nature of water!
Evidence for this outrageous claim, you ask? Recall that even our supposed "Champions of Liberty" Milton Friedman and Friederich von Hayek were corrupted on that fateful night on Pilgrim Mountain. Only van Mises remained stalwart and fled the corruption, turning away from the group in holy and righteous disgust, exclaiming the greatest of condemnations "You're a bunch of socialists!".
Now you, my most skeptical interlocutor objects somewhat justifiedly with "Well then, the whole world may indeed be corrupted by Socialism most foul. But what maketh Socialism to be Witchcraft, the unholy will of the great Deceiver himself?".
Behold then the evidence of the greatest crime of our time! What is the twinned curse of a failing birth rate and a decline in testosterone, if not the stealing of penises en masse!
*"Meanwhile, the Devil isn’t trying to maximize 21st century utilitarian evil. He’s trying to turn souls away from God. **So although he could curse people directly**, what he actually wants is for humans to sell their soul to him in exchange for curse powers."*
The "although he could curse people directly" thing is technically true, but would miss the entire point of Judeo-Christian worldview vs. good and evil. In TL;DR: form, God created man with free will: a free will that is the one thing *not even he will mess around with directly*, ever.
I mean, technically, God could turn people's minds to whatever he wants them to think. But he does not - apart from maybe confusing someone for a short while ("hardening their hearts" kind of stuff), there are no examples either in Jewish or Christian scripture of God *directly* messing with people's minds ("He made him believe he was a giant rabbit"). Instead, you as a created being are put in a world you need to make sense of, and have to take it from there.
So the devil has to work indirectly, as it were: his goal is to make people *chose* to fall away from God. Cursing them might help, but usually won't: he has to take a more indirect route most of the time. So in this regard, the Malleus Maleficarum makes perfect sense.
Nah, making sense of the world is decidedly not an important part of the Christian worldview, that's the heresy of the Enlightenment, which itself is a manifestation of the sin of Pride. The world is God's creation, inheriting from Him the qualities of being mysterious and unfathomable, and people are hopelessly lost in it without divine guidance, which is in part facilitated by the Church. The Devil is free to to lie and inflict illusions in order to subvert free will, before which you are helpless without God's protection.
Attempting to study the world isn't exactly misguided, but only to the extent that this would fill the relatively unimportant gaps in the Biblical picture, with which definitely no contradictions may be discovered even in principle.
"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.
"Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.
"If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?
"Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion."
In case that needs glossing: Augustine is writing to his fellow Christians, and saying don't be caught saying something ignorant about the natural world, and especially don't make it worse by trying to defend your error by quoting Scripture inappropriately.
This is false under most versions of Christian theology. (If anything, it's a better description of medieval Islamic views.)
In general, Christians held that the world was knowable and lawful, and discovering those laws was a way to honor God. Theology was proclaimed "queen of the sciences"; this implies the existence, and good standing, of other sciences to be queen of.
Ah, the eating grass bit? It seems to be interpreted as a punishment for the king's pride (and tyranny over the peoples), and that he forgets, even having been told, that all his power ultimately comes from God. The curse/punishment is triggered when the king makes a boast about how he created this great kingdom (all by himself, out of his own power):
"24 “This is the interpretation, Your Majesty, and this is the decree the Most High has issued against my lord the king: 25 You will be driven away from people and will live with the wild animals; you will eat grass like the ox and be drenched with the dew of heaven. Seven times will pass by for you until you acknowledge that the Most High is sovereign over all kingdoms on earth and gives them to anyone he wishes. 26 The command to leave the stump of the tree with its roots means that your kingdom will be restored to you when you acknowledge that Heaven rules. 27 Therefore, Your Majesty, be pleased to accept my advice: Renounce your sins by doing what is right, and your wickedness by being kind to the oppressed. It may be that then your prosperity will continue.”
After the seven years were up, his sanity was restored and so was his kingship:
"37 Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and exalt and glorify the King of heaven, because everything he does is right and all his ways are just. And those who walk in pride he is able to humble."
This reminds me of the Irish tale of Mad Sweeney, who likewise is cursed to animal-form by a saint for offending him:
"I omitted most of the many, many times when Kramer follows his claims with stories of the cases that led him to believe them (...) Everything is like this. Rare is the unsourced claim."
Reminds me of the vast majority of published business books. Case studies and anecdotes galore, always reinforcing the author's particular point-of-view.
The part about the witch covens conferring with the Devil in a man's body reminded me of the Decameron story of the guy getting hired at the nunnery to have sex with the nuns. There's got to be at least one story of a coven making carnal deals with some guy pretending to be the Devil, only for the actual Devil to show up five minutes later with a "sorry I'm late, I had to stop to pick my kid up from school" and a very awkward time for all involved.
I feel like this whole article has a very weird tone for the topic, which is the torture and murder of thousands of people, and is not just confined to the past but is still happening in Africa today ...
Your idea that Kramer was just an ordinary, well-intentioned guy trying his best to understand the world seems to be undermined by his Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Kramer. He seems to have been regarded negatively by lots of his peers. Disclaimer: I know nothing myself about this topic
The wikipedia entry suggests that *some* of his peers were disapproving, but the guy was appointed as a papal nuncio and given standing ovations by others. Probably not a massive outlier for the time.
To be specific, the entry says that Kramer seems to have written the book as a self-justification after being expelled from Innsbruck by the Bishop who disapproved of his methods. It mentions that he had a fixation on the sexuality of one of the accused.
It also says 'Kramer failed in his attempt to obtain endorsement for this work from the top theologians of the Inquisition at the Faculty of Cologne, and they condemned the book as recommending unethical and illegal procedures, as well as being inconsistent to what they perceived as the orthodox Catholic doctrines of demonology'
Yes he was received well elsewhere. But maybe Scott is being too quick in adopting the idea that this was a good, well-motivated person. Some of the details in his biography seem to suggest otherwise.
Again, I am a total newcomer on this topic, just to clarify.
I'd really like to see a SSC (or reader) book review of Graham Hancock's supernatural. Yes, he's a "Atlantean chamber of records in a cavity under the Sphinx" kind of guy, as well as a book on "what if there were a TECHNOLOGICAL explanation for the supposed magical powers of the Ark of the Covenant (and where the hell is it hidden, anyway)?"
Supernatural is everything from cave art to alien abductions. One of the book's theories is that a key step on the path to evolutionary modern humans was discovering altered states of consciousness - sometimes through rituals, sometimes through mushrooms, and according to the book, there have always been a small number of humans who could spontaneously (and often involuntarily) enter altered states of consciousness. Some cultures created the role of shaman for them, and they were able to contribute to human civilisation (the stone-age version of the social model of disability?) whereas we diagnose them as mentally ill.
Point is, a lot of their experiences sound a lot like magic, witchcraft and wizardry - their actual visions are of course socially mediated, so cavemen would experience some kind of supernatural bison hunt, nowadays it's aliens, but in the middle ages it could have well taken the form of consorting with devils. There's lots and lots of experiencing being pierced with spears and having your body cut open in a trance state (I presume penis-stealing comes into this somewhere). And of course someone randomly being struck down by trance states would look a lot like they'd been cursed or bewitched.
In the middle ages in particular, the ergot fungus that grows on rye fields seems to have been a big problem, it not only caused physical poisoning symptoms but also had psychoactive effects "simliar to LSD" in malnourished people in particular (the book goes into some detail on this). The wikipedia page on ergotism even speculates about a connection to the Salem witch trials.
I searched thru the comments here and found not one reference to rye, ergot, hallucinations, and witches. CORRECTION: Spruce's comment above just appeared 3 minutes ago, so updating.
But here is link to a study that purports to document witchcraft "activities" with outbreaks of rye ergot:
>All suspected witches have the right to an attorney. But if the attorney goes overboard defending the client, it is reasonable to suspect him of being a witch himself.
That sounds awfully familiar even today. There are too many people even today rejecting that defendants have rights, no matter how severe the accusations.
That's because it's a pretty unintuitive idea that having an attorney procure exoneration for a client that he knows is guilty is a Good Thing for society. I doubt that the average person would agree.
An attorney's role isn't to exonerate clients they know to be guilty, it's to try and exonerate clients they suspect MIGHT be guilty, because in reality there's a good chance those suspicions are wrong (especially if the evidence is, in fact, weak enough for them to be exonerated.)
(Well, guilt isn't a binary thing, so even a client who is unambiguously guilty of *something* isn't necessarily deserving of the harshest possible punishment - again, even if the attorney suspects they are a complete piece of shit and deserve whatever's coming to them, such suspicions are in fact frequently wrong.)
‘Caliban and the witch’ by Silvia Federici is another interesting attempt to explain why witch-hunting became such a big thing. She takes a kinda Marxist-feminist approach. Basically, with the transition from feudalism to capitalism it was advantageous for the nobility to try a divide-and-rule approach towards the proles. Conflict between the sexes rather than class war. Then the population shortage after the Plague added an extra incentive to subjugate women. End result: witch-hunt.
Don’t know how accurate it is. She does seem to think that feudalism was kinda like a communalistic utopia. But I think she’s right in highlighting the link between witches and reproduction - see the mention of miscarriages and infanticide in Scott’s review.
It’s definitely an entertaining read. Complete with illustrations of the penis-birdnest!
If you're nuts enough, you can read Dutton's Witches, Feminism, and the Decline of the West. He argues that feminism and witchcraft are attempts by genetically unfit spiteful mutants to diminish reproduction.
I have to admit, I had the same thought: "some power greater than human is looming as a threat and we have to take action to stop it now, or else! how do we know? well we can't know, but we must act anyway!"
I have a friend who is in her 70s, whose family was heavily into witchcraft when she was a child. The way she describes it is pretty much a type of child abuse, but apparently her mom actually believed she was able to cast some kinds of spells. With the caveat that these events happened 60+ years before I knew the the people involved, I think the mom was a mixture of superstitious and mentally unbalanced. Superstitions used to be really common - my parents knew people in very rural Kentucky that believed some weird stuff, like if you get slapped in the back while pregnant your kid will look like the face you were making.
For the family I was talking about above, the kids distanced themselves from their mom about as soon as they were able and rejected anything to do with her, but are still really freaked out by anything like it to this day. I'm not sure if they do or do not believe that witchcraft is (potentially) real.
1. The Romans also thought witches existed, but because they came at it from another perspective, they were opposed merely to *bad* uses of witchcraft.
2. Even C. S. Lewis thought the only reason we shouldn't burn witches is because they don't exist. If they did, we should.
1. The distinction between religion and magic is due to Abrahamic religions. Saints preform miracles through the power of God, whereas witches invoke Satan.
Presumably if it met the standard of evidence we use for other methods of murder, assault, property crimes, etc.
(Interesting question if in the US we’d require the evidentiary standard for treason to specifically punish the part where it’s done to advance the interests of a hostile foreign power.)
Though I’m pretty sure the current consensus, and that in England during Lewis’s lifetime, is still against burning for any crime, however heinous.
As I recall, Lewis said that we don't *execute* witches because we don't believe they exist. He didn't mention burning specifically, so I assume he was thinking of hanging, which was the usual form of execution in England during his time.
In other words, C.S.Lewis says that you should not blame the religion for doing what the Bible says. Hey, if you believed in the Bible and obeyed it, you would be a horrible person too!
I wonder what Inquisition did to people who gently pointed out that perhaps their holy book is full of shit and witches actually do not exist.
I can’t reconcile this with the advice Scott shared a few weeks ago from a Christian sub stack saying that the devil compels your worship while God merely invites it. Seems like the conception of the devil in this book is very consent-oriented, getting verbal confirmation of worship intent and also taking measures to make sure worshippers are satisfied and compensated. So when did the view switch to the Devil compelling worship?
The "God merely invites" bit is hilarious given that the guy (?) literally threatens you with forms of tortue beyond your comprehension if you don't play ball. Like, I can almost imagine God a she\her progressive saying "Freedom of Speech doesn't mean Freedom from Consequences".
>very consent-oriented, getting verbal confirmation of worship intent and also taking measures to make sure worshippers are satisfied and compensated
But that's just the start of the employment, right ? The devil is a seducer. Every seduction begins sweetly, the consent theater is pointless (just like in real life) because the actual compelling was done long ago, in the form of manipulating the person into circumstances where the act is the only reasonable choice. A.K.A., "is working my job really my own free will if I will starve without it ?"
The Devil requiring consent has to do with Catholic theology about free will. You can't be tricked or stumble into sin, for it to be truly serious and soul-damning, you have to know what you are doing and agree to it.
This ties in with all the stories about lawyers defeating the Devil (e.g. the Devil and Daniel Webster) due to this kind of 'bound by the terms of the contract' reasoning.
You know, I am not up on my theology of the devil as it is currently held, so I can't answer that one. I don't know what the original quote was, or what variety of Christian Substack that was - I'm presuming it was some denomination of Protestant.
I think the idea is that the Devil wishes to redirect the rightful worship of God away from God and towards himself, if possible, but certainly anyway getting the human to abandon God and put some other 'god' in His place (whether that be worship of sex, worldly success, money, power, whatever). The Devil does not care about free will, but being less powerful and only a created being himself, he has to work within the limitations God puts on temptations, such as we see in the book of Job.
I appreciate the information, I’m very ignorant of these things. The quote was: “God wants your worship to be freely given, the Antichrist wants to compel it” and it is from Scott’s summary of “Tipping Point Prophecy Update” substack that he describes as evangelical. I was just caught by how much that description of the antichrist differs from the pop culture deal-with-the-devil and then saw in this post that that isn’t so much pop culture as old school inquisition belief. Though I guess I was conflating the Antichrist with Satan. Which raises the further question of whether the Antichrist is Satan?? This rabbit hole is too deep for me.
I lived in a Midwestern community from 1978-1999. I saw "normal" church goers become fundamental and join strange (to me) churches. I was actually fearful to let my kids buy and play Dungeons and Dragons. This is absolutely the beginning of what is happening now. His reference to "Satanic Panic" (in blue) is worth a read as well. These people were in a bible study group with me, and were very "normal" they changed so much in a couple of years that I couldn't be friends with them anymore. My way of coping was going back to college and majoring in Physics and Mathematics. lol
>what else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colors! Therefore if it be a sin to divorce her when she ought to be kept, it is indeed a necessary torture, for either we commit adultery by divorcing her, or we must endure daily strife.
Damn. And to think that this guy is ***checks google*** called Golden Mouth, what kind of garbage sewer mouth would spew all this hatred on our sweet partners in humanity.
Now this is the kind of content for which I subscribe!
Regarding Montague Summers, he was one of those eccentrics that a previous comment thread was asking about. Richard Feynman frequented strip clubs? Penny-ante stuff. Did Feynman write about demons, witches, vampires and werewolves, being regarded as a respectable authority on same?
Summers was allegedly a clergyman, but there's some doubt as to whether he ever was really a priest. He had been ordained an Anglican deacon, but then he converted to Catholicism, and went about saying he was a priest but there's no records (so far as I know) that he ever officially was one.
There's a lot of fascinating stuff about late Victorian/Edwardian Englishmen who converted to Catholicism then went off the deep end (or were already off the deep end), such as the self-styled Baron Corvo, one Frederick Rolfe. Especially his novel "Hadrian the Seventh" which contains an authorial self-insert who becomes pope (and it is very gay, as was Rolfe himself, but that romantic, sentimental, mawkish gayness of a certain strain of English writing).
There's also Robert Hugh Benson, scion of an Anglican clerical family, who converted, was ordained, and is also well-known for his ghost/horror/supernatural fiction. He had two brothers who were also writers, A.C. Benson and the better known E.F. Benson.
Regarding the accounts of penis-stealing, that's koro. Today we send people to psychiatrists, not inquisitors, to get it fixed.
And to sum up, the "Hexenhammer" is an example of why Pope Leo didn't take Martin Luther seriously. Some German friar is having freakouts over the Epistles of St. Paul? Yeah, well, the Germans are like that, everybody knows. Kramer himself got into trouble for his obsession with witches:
"Helena Scheuberin was an Austrian woman who stood trial accused of witchcraft in 1485. Her trial and acquittal led Heinrich Kramer to write Malleus Maleficarum, which was published two years later.
…The defendants' lawyer raised procedural objections, which the commissary general, representing Bishop Golser, upheld. The accused were released after putting up a bond to appear should the case be resumed. In the end, Helena Scheuberin and the other six women were all either freed or received mild sentences in the form of penance.
The trials were overseen in part by inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, who traveled to Germany to investigate witches. The local diocese refused to honor his jurisdiction, leading Kramer to seek and receive the papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus (1484) which reaffirmed his jurisdiction and authority as an inquisitor.
Kramer was dissatisfied with the outcome of the trials and stayed in Innsbruck to continue his investigations. Exchanged letters show Bishop of Brixen Georg Golser, whose diocese contained Innsbruck, commanding Kramer to leave the city. He eventually left after the Bishop expelled Kramer for insanity and his obsession towards Helena. He returned to Cologne and wrote a treatise on witchcraft that became the Malleus Maleficarum (first published 1487), an instruction guide for identifying witches."
"In 1484 clergyman Heinrich Kramer made one of the first attempts at prosecuting alleged witches in the Tyrol region. It was not a success: he was expelled from the city of Innsbruck and dismissed by the local bishop as "senile and crazy".
Some scholars have suggested that following the failed efforts in Tyrol, Kramer requested explicit authority from the Pope to prosecute witchcraft. Kramer received a papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus in 1484. It gave full papal approval for the Inquisition to prosecute what was deemed to be witchcraft in general and also gave individual authorizations to Kramer and Dominican Friar Jacob Sprenger specifically. Other scholars have disputed the idea that Sprenger was working with Kramer, arguing that the evidence shows that Sprenger was actually a persistent opponent of Kramer, even going so far as to ban him from Dominican convents within Sprenger's jurisdiction while also banning him from preaching.
...The preface also includes an alleged unanimous approbation from the University of Cologne's Faculty of Theology. Nevertheless, many historians have argued that it is well established by sources outside the Malleus that the university's theology faculty condemned the book for unethical procedures and for contradicting Catholic theology on a number of important points: "just for good measure Institoris {Kramer's Latinised pen name] forged a document granting their apparently unanimous approbation."
The book became the handbook for secular courts throughout Renaissance Europe, but was not used by the Inquisition, which "denied any authority to the Malleus"
So he wasn't above implying he had more official authority and backing than he did, and indeed forging documents:
"The bull was written in response to the request of Dominican Inquisitor Heinrich Kramer for explicit authority to prosecute witchcraft in Germany, after he was refused assistance by the local ecclesiastical authorities, who maintained that as the letter of deputation did not specifically mention where the inquisitors may operate, they could not legally exercise their functions in their areas. The bull sought to remedy this jurisdictional dispute by specifically identifying the dioceses of Mainz, Köln, Trier, Salzburg, and Bremen.
The bull urged local authorities to cooperate with the inquisitors and threatened those who impeded their work with excommunication. Despite this threat, the bull failed to ensure that Kramer obtained the support he had hoped for, causing him to retire and to compile his views on witchcraft into his book Malleus Maleficarum, which was published in 1487. The Malleus professed, in part fraudulently, to have been approved by the University of Cologne, and it was sensational in the stigma it attached to witchcraft as a worse crime than heresy and in its notable animus against women.
...Summis desiderantes affectibus was published as part of the preface of the book, implying papal approval for the work. However, the Malleus Maleficarum received an official condemnation by the Church three years later, and Kramer's claims of approval are seen by modern scholars as misleading."
So why the witchcraft craze? And why places like Germany falling for it wholesale, while other regions didn't? That is a good question to ask. Why do people fall for conspiracy theories today?
> And I don’t want to completely rule out that some people actually tried witchcraft... The history of modern occultism implies that any sufficiently schizo-spectrum person who asks to see the Devil will come away satisfied..
There is another possibility, that Wicha was actually a "movement" back then, either remnants of paganism, or a fad like hipiedom. It wasn't rogue schizophrenics, it was a group of people.
This piece is a great illustration of why I can’t get comfortable with Scott or the rationalist community generally. The post is genuinely interesting, informative, provocative, and even admirably self-aware, but it can’t bring itself to follow through on its own logic when that logic threatens the self-image of rationalism as a based thinking person’s alternative to cringe academic progressivism.
I think Scott is commendably perceptive to see himself in Kramer, a clever man willing to fearlessly entertain the mind-boggling consequences of actually taking commonplace beliefs seriously, and to be afraid of this similarity. But he pulls his punch before getting to the big payoff: thinking independently and writing contrarian books about bold world-changing ideas is *dangerous*, the normal standards of intellectual hygiene that so impress Scott are not enough, and a responsible critical thinker must go further by including marginalized perspectives that don’t make it into the “respectable” hegemonic discourse.
The problem comes in framing Kramer’s received hegemonic worldview of upper-class literate Europeans as the only one reasonably available to him. This overlooks not only his peers’ many contemporary responses that called out his problematic, prejudiced, and unfair project, but the fact that the “witches” themselves had plenty of critiques!
So my takeaway is not that, alas, even with the best of intentions, a well-meaning rationalist can accidentally do a whoopsie and set off a few centuries of torturing innocent people to death. It’s that “merely” trying to make sense of common beliefs and taking them to their logical conclusions (according to hegemonic logic), without carefully accounting for the viewpoints being excluded from these deliberations, is a deadly epistemic sin that can lead smart people to do evil things. The lesson of Malleus Maleficarum for rationalists is that they actually need to be reading cringe academics writing about things like “epistemic injustice”, “antiblackness”, and “patriarchal systems of knowledge production”, or else they might become the scary monsters.
(The reason I keep reading the blog is that clearly Scott is smart and self-critical enough to have considered this, so maybe he’s trying to tee up this conclusion for us in an indirect way that avoids his losing ingroup status among other anti-feminist rationalists. But alas, he just disavowed Straussian hermeneutics in the last post…)
Oh no, there are no BIPOC commenters leaving their opinions of this post! Whatever shall we do?
I realise that sounds flippant, but I do not worry about "Is somebody in Angola excluded from reading this blog because they feel it is an unsafe space?", largely because I think most of the people in Angola have more pressing concerns and who knows but what the native Angolan rationalist scene is thriving and they have their own bloggers and commentariat and don't feel the need to be reading American websites?
"Will nobody think of the children?" appeals don't tend to go down well.
Right now, on our national classical music station, they've been running Black History Month broadcasts all the week. And you know what? It's all about African-American history (black female composers, for instance).
And you know why that is? Because we don't have native black people to have a history of being black in Ireland, not in sufficient numbers to date. We're getting a lot more black and Asian and other immigrants, and in ten or twenty years time we might have enough stories of our own that such an event would be meaningful. Meanwhile, as I said, we don't even have the "Afro-Caribbean/Black British" experience of next door, so the nice progressively-minded people who want to be sensitive and aware and representative have to wholesale import the entire notion and content from the USA.
So can you understand why I am less than gruntled with pious platitudes about "this is why People Of Colour don't comment on here"?
There may or may not be such genetically-based differences. I think that a lot of discussion around it is useless, either pro- or anti-, because we just don't have reliable data yet. The kind of "IQ tests prove Africans have a mean IQ of 90" stuff is not good but neither is the "the reason Jamal isn't going to Harvard to be a doctor is because of systemic racism, not because he skipped 90% of school and prefers to be a drug dealer" stuff.
Take the vexed question of "women in STEM". Is there a role for sexism being a discriminatory force there? Yes. But there also appears to be a legitimate difference in the spectrum of mathematical ability/intelligence between men and women, where you get more men on the extremes of "idiots/geniuses" while most women cluster around the middle.
So if you want mathematically gifted people in STEM, you are more likely to have more male candidates than female, because there are going to be more guys on the "genius" side of the distribution than women, even if we did away with sexism etc. in the morning.
Maybe there is a similar result for African-American population; less at the extremes, clustered around the middle, so as a natural distribution there are going to be fewer African-Americans on the "genius" side. Not *none*, just *fewer* so "why are there not as many African-American Nobel prize winners?" is *not* down to systemic racism or whatever.
So now I'm a scientific racist for saying we don't have sufficiently good data about global populations to make any pronouncements one way or the other about 'X race or sub-population smarter/stupider than Y race or sub-population'.
Maybe we can say "Asians somewhat smarter than whites in some fields"? Is that racist or scientific or both?
Yes, African-American non-readers of ACX, I think that you are all stupid and violent criminals. Naturally that is the conclusion to be drawn from "maybe some of the alleged IQ gap is down to that particular sub-population, due to a combination of historical environmental factors, clustering around median intelligence and not being long-tailed on both idiocy and genius". How nice to know that unless I am willing to blindly declare "Every single one of the African-American population, without exception, is a blazing genius and the only reason they are not all replacing whites in Ivy League universities, top hospitals, NASA and the likes is systemic racism, because it cannot be that even one single African-American may just be average intelligence" then I am a racist. I wouldn't even say that about my own countrymen, but then again, you can't be racist to whites, correct?
More shocking and startling revelations: I do think that fewer women are interested in/capable of high level maths than men, which explains a lot of the gap about "why not enough women in STEM". Is that scientific sexism, or must I do public declaration of "of *course* the answer is always and only sexism, not girls have different interests which they pursue"?
I guess that's why I'm in denial of the likes of this woman in STEM:
Curious what makes you confident few commenters here are people of color. Are you making assumptions about a connection between people's skin color and the style and content of their writing?
I am one of those people - at least, while I do not consider it to be proven, and do not have the mathematical ability to deeply grok such things as principal component analysis and other advanced statistical tools, I do at least have something of an informed lay person's understanding, and I am prepared to take at face value the consensus of the intelligence research community - that is; a strong consensus that IQ tests measure something real and important, strong consensus that the differences between racial group averages measured by IQ tests reflect real differences in average cognitive ability and are not just artefacts of test bias, and a weak consensus that genetic differences probably underlie some, but not all, of those differences in average cognitive ability, albeit with really no consensus at all as to what percentage (other than 'not 0% and not 100%') of the average differences are accounted for by genetics and what percentage by non-genetic factors. Scott himself is on record as being at least concerned that these claims *could* be true, but that he really doesn't like talking about it because of the backlash he gets from egalitarian ideologues, so I don't think it's fair of you to demand that he disavow these claims until you have at least done the work and shown that they could not possibly be true.
Also, what *exactly* is racist about The Bell Curve?
Thinking there are zero genetic differences in average intelligence between the races seems either amazingly naive or the result of ideologically-induced logic dysfunction. I mean, 80% of the NBA is black, and a non-black man hasn't won the gold medal in the Olympic 100m since 1980. Normal people look at that and say, well yeah, black people are just on average genetically better sprinters and jumpers. Yellow people consistently gain entrance to the most intellectually demanding of schools and professions at rates much higher than their representation in the population. Normal people look at that and say, well yeah yellow people are just on average genetically smarter.
Saying that only in one particular area of human ability and only for one particular race comparison there are no genetic differences at all is logically incoherent. I don't see how someone could hold that position without suffering from an ideological compromise of his rational faculties.
The rational man's response to the whole observation is to say: so what? That there are modest differences in the genetic component of abilities beween the races does not have any obvious and useful implications for the structure of society. We already know people vary tremendously in abilities, both physical and intellectual (and the variation between individuals dwarfs that between races), and we need a society that accommodates that spectrum. Criminals are mostly dumb, so we need a judicial system that copes with that. We need to siphon off the smart people to be doctors and physicists. We would like to siphon off the athletically gifted to entertain us on the TV. Maybe lesbians are inherently wittier, so we'd like to siphon them off to improve stand-up comedy. It's clearly a good idea to siphon off the physically enduring and mentally resilient to populate our armed forces.
That more white or black or yellow or red or purple people might end up in any given category than is accounted for by pure chance seems a mere philosophical observation, with little practical effect and even less interest, unless you're obsessed with this stuff for some strange personal reason, or via paranoia think it's always evidence of some vast conspiracy.
Only an intellectual could seriously argue that skin color "corresponds fairly poorly to genetic differences." You suppose some people just self-identify as black or white, and that changes their melanin concentration? We're just seeing how much time they spent in the sun as a kid? I'm normally not that impressed by the extent to which people will bend themselves into logical pretzels to avoid inconvenient obvious fact, since it's commonplace, but this is still something.
Anyway, the rest of what you've said is a farrago of handwaving and non-sequiturs. None of it addreses in the slightest my point, which is that accepting that there are differences in, say, athletic ability that stem from genetic distinctions and then turning around and doubting that such a thing is possible at all in intellectual ability is logically self-contradictory.
I'd be shocked if any normal black people think their overrepresentation in elite track and field and the NBA has no basis at all in genetic advantage. Can you name such a person? There ought to be tons, if you are correct.
I'd also like to see an example of "many" people moving quickly from "there are genetic differnces" to "white supremacy is true" to believe this isn't just a figment of your imagination. I've personally never come across such a person, and I've been around since midway through the previous century. Maybe you have a lot more experience of people, or maybe you hang out with an unusually thick-headed crowd.
Or maybe this conclusion is a product of your imagination and ideology. Maybe you're sure white supremacists are everywhere the way Kramer was sure witches were everywhere, and maybe you feel a need for us to be vigilant about them the way Kramer thought we should be worried about witches in our midst.
I see what you mean, @ ±Z—I was expecting "who are you to speak for the blacks?", not "yes, ACX is hostile to racial minorities, and this is fine because of an unrelated racial grievance I have".
While that is certainly an impolite way of phrasing it, and presumably fails both the 'kind' and 'necessary' hurdles of the Victorian Buddha Sufi Lite comment policy, the idea that there *are* people of Sub-Saharan African ancestry who are sufficiently impulsive as to be unable to resist the temptation to riot when the opportunity arises is certainly true, and the idea that they comprise a larger proportion of the black population than the riot-prone fractions of other racial groups is at least plausible on current evidence.
Yes, I suppose it does count as "racial grievance" that in order to keep up with the Joneses, we must import American obsessions such as Black History Month (will we be celebrating November as Native American Heritage Month, too? I'd have more sympathy with that one) and since we don't have any actual black history of our own to talk about, we need to import the American version as well.
If Integer will go out, find some unrepresented BIPOC folx and ask them do they give a damn about whether or not there are sufficient numbers of non-white people reading this blog, then I'll be more impressed than more pointless virtue signalling. I could presume that Integer is a white guy, but if he/she/they are not, then great. They can be our Token BIPOC Leftist Progressive, ain't that nice?
Now, if there are any real BIPOC readers/commenters here, please feel free to have a go at me. That at least is more honest than mutterings about "The commentariat here is hostile to People Of Colour, but not me, *I'm* one of the Good Ones".
Hey, I note below that January and August are free, maybe Integer can get one of these rebranded as "ACX People Of Colour Reparations For Not Doing Enough To Have You Comment On Here, Grovelling Apologies Month".
Black History Month began as a way to teach people about the history of Black Americans and their contributions to society, it sought to ensure that these perspectives were included in the national narrative.
Today, Black History Month is a call to inclusion year-round and celebrates more than Black history, but also the ongoing achievements of African Americans in all realms of society.
March: Women's History Month
Celebrate Women's History Month at Harvard from March 1 to March 31, 2021. Women's History Month began as a smaller "Women's History Week" on March 7, 1982, and was later petitioned by the National Women's History Project to become a month-long celebration. The month of March officially became Women's History Month in 1987 and gives us the opportunity to acknowledge the historical contributions of women in the United States. International Women's Day is observed on March 8th. Learn more about Women's History Month.
April: Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Month
National Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Month (SAAM) recognizes the ongoing need to put an end to the crime of sexual assault. April is also a time to acknowledge the resilience of those impacted by sexual assault including survivors and victims, as well as advocates and professionals supporting survivors, and to ensure that our homes, places of learning and work are safe for all.
May: Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Asian Pacific American Heritage Month began in 1977 as a smaller ten day celebration in May, and transformed to a month-long observance in 1990. The month commemorates the resilience and legacy, traditions, and culture of Asians, Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders across the United States.
June: Pride Month
Pride Month was created to commemorate the Stonewall Rebellion which took place on June 28, 1969, considered by historians to be the start of the modern LGBTQ+ movement. The month commemorates the progress of LGBTQ+ history and civil rights, and celebrates queer stories and excellence of the community.
July: Disability Pride Month
The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed by President George H.W. Bush on July 26, 1990, a landmark law that prohibited discrimination against people with disabilities. In that same year, Boston held the first Disability Pride Day.
Although Disability Pride Day isn't nationally recognized, parades are held in a number of places nationwide, such as Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, San Antonio and more. In 2015, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio declared July Disability Pride Month in celebration of the ADA’s 25th anniversary.
The month is a chance to honor each person's uniqueness as "a natural and beautiful part of human diversity," according to America's Disability Community.
September: Latinx Heritage Month
Latinx Heritage Month started as a weeklong celebration in 1968, and has grown to a month from September 15 through October 15 to incorporate the independence days of Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua. The month recognizes the legacies and contributions of individuals who trace their roots to Spain, Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Spanish-speaking nations of the Caribbean.
October: LGBTQ+ History Month
LGBTQ+ History Month honors members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender nonconforming, and queer communities. October was chosen to nationally commemorate LGBTQ+ history, political activism, and contributions because several important dates fall within the month, including National Coming Out Day (October 11), Spirit Day acknowledging LGBTQ+ youth (October 20), Asexual Awareness Week (last week in October), and others.
November: Native American Heritage Month
In November, Native American Heritage Month celebrates the long history of Indigenous people and communities. During this month we acknowledge the rich culture, unique traditions, and ongoing contributions of Native Americans."
In another comment, you asked whether mentioning certain facts about group differences might make blacks feel unwelcome here. Are you suggesting that a policy be instituted requiring lying (by omission if not explicitly) regarding such facts in order to make blacks feel equally welcome to e.g. Ashkenazim? Such a departure from free inquiry would seem to me to be at odds with the stated aims of this community.
>ought this blog to be equally welcoming to people of all races?
I think you are smuggling some strategic equivocation in there with the word 'welcoming'. An analogy: Ought a hip-hop club be equally welcoming of all races? What if the number of East Asians attending your hip-hop club is a tiny fraction of their percentage of the East Asian population of the city the club is in? Well, I don't think that the organizers should have a deliberate policy of excluding people of East Asian ancestry, and I don't think they should tolerate racist mistreatment of the few East Asians who attend at the hands of the presumably majority black patrons, but if East Asians genuinely are on average less musically interested in hip-hop than black people, or are genuinely more squicked out by the subject matter of the lyrics, or by the sexualized nature of the dancing that goes on in your club, then I don't think your club ought to be under any obligation to go out of its way to recruit more clientele from the East Asian population.
Likewise, if this blog has no policy of excluding people of particular racial groups (how could that even be enforced? I don't remember Substack asking me to tick a racial census box when I signed up), and makes reasonable effort to tamp down on people being abusive to others on the basis of race, then if members of some groups are simply less likely to be interested in discussing politics, medicine, AI risk and, yes, intelligence research, then I do not see why Scott should be expected to go out of his way to pander to those groups.
>I'm very sorry you're upset about Black History Month, American obsessions, virtue signaling, the concept of apologizing, the fact that there are too many months, and my failure to go out and interview a bunch of "BIPOC folx" before commenting.
I don't think she's upset about those months being celebrated in the USA, I think she's just annoyed at the American cultural imperialism that expects people in Ireland, where the population of people from many of those categories is negligible, to be as obsessed about celebrating those particular identity groups as Americans are.
I accept your apology in the spirit in which it is offered.
(And that's the last mean thing I am going to say).
Now I am going to disengage from this exchange, and I will explain why because I do owe that much courtesy to anyone with whom I am interacting.
I *want* to continue this fight, because that is what it has become. We are not exchanging information, we are quarrelling. And I have mulled over various responses, but they included insults (and that is what the things I might have said would be, making no bones about it). I *want* to get into a screaming row with you, but that is *not* what this place is about.
(Also, I cannot bear the thought of Scott "I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed").
So I'm going to shut up and walk away right this second, with no counter-accusations, self-justifications, or smart remarks.
> “epistemic injustice”, “antiblackness”, and “patriarchal systems of knowledge production”
As a rule of thumb, if something can be read of routinely in the New York Times, it is probably not a "marginalized perspective", and indeed may well be part of that "respectable hegemonic discourse".
I am, of course, in favor of reading and contemplating marginalized perspectives. But if you go looking for perspectives that are actually marginalized, as opposed to feted by the mainstream, you end up in uncomfortable places.
I agree that poor, elderly women are better-represented in hegemonic discourse than they were in 1486 (although perhaps still not a group that can put its thoughts into the public conversation as easily as, say, young male Bay Area rationalists); today I'd say that the global poor, nonhuman domestic animals, and children are more obvious examples of groups experiencing/at risk of serious harm because they're not well-represented in decisions that affect them. But we can and should do better than intuition and personal grievance in assessing this social-epistemic landscape.
What Kramer's example shows is that rationalists ought to be very concerned with exactly how "witches" were excluded from the discourses that condemned them, how this form of oppression has waned since then, and whom rationalists might be accidentally harming in similar ways today. There happens to be a school of academic investigation that focuses on these questions, it's called "feminist epistemology", and the thing that bugs me about rationalism is that most of the community reflexively dismisses the field like this without engaging with it beyond the first word.
> how "witches" were excluded from the discourses that condemned them, how this form of oppression has waned since then, and whom rationalists might be accidentally harming in similar ways today
This seems like it applies equally to any time anyone is ever condemned, for everything. If someone has meaningful influence over a given discourse, it seems unlikely that that discourse would condemn them.
Assuming you wish to retain the ability to condemn anything, then, it seems you can't rely too heavily on this meta-level heuristic, and must actually just engage with the object-level question of what is actually good and bad. I am fairly sure, for instance, that the "feminist epistemologists" do condemn things, and that the objects of their condemnation are excluded from the discourse of feminist epistemology.
There are plenty of discourses where people get a fair chance to speak and are then fairly condemned anyway: consider criminal trials with good defense counsel, or the richest 1% being unpopular despite having more than their share of airtime.
Separately, there can be both just and unjust reasons for excluding a perspective from a conversation, regardless of whether you agree with the perspective: “because this decision doesn’t affect you in any way” is legitimate, “because we don’t care what ugly old lower-class women think” is not.
If you agree that harmful and unjust epistemic exclusion sometimes happens (e.g. weird old ladies not getting a fair hearing re: witch-hunting), and you want to base your decisions and projects on rational grounds, you should at least be interested in understanding how these forms of epistemic violence work and whether any might be affecting your knowledge base right now.
I am interested in the question of what perspectives might be missing from mainstream discourse, whether that exclusion is just or unjust, and how it might be affecting the conclusions of that discourse.
It seems to me that calling such an exclusion "epistemic violence", or calling the study of this area "feminist epistemology", amounts to smuggling in premises that should instead be examined critically. In what sense is excluding someone's perspective from a discourse comparable to actually injuring them using physical force? Is unjust exclusion from the discourse actually a phenomenon that solely affects women?
Overall, while it could always be better, it seems to me that the rationalist community does better than average on considering these questions. That makes me suspicious that your complaint is less about epistemics per se, and more about rationalists not acceding to your preferred hidden premises.
Interesting questions indeed! Gender is an fruitful and popular starting place for considering social epistemic exclusion, because there are so many clear-cut examples to dissect, but "feminist" epistemologists certainly don't claim it's the only one; many or most work in dialogue with theorists of other aspects of the social production of knowledge. I'd encourage you to take a look at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-social-epistemology/#EpiInj to see if you think there's anything in there that’s of interest to rationalists who care about these questions (and who are willing to read authors with differing political views).
Also, I fully agree that the rationalist community does "better than average" at considering the social forces that shape their knowledge bases. That's precisely why I find it frustrating that you all don't do quite as well, in my opinion, as academic critical theorists usually do, and why I’m writing out explanations of why I think the community has something to learn from them!
How so? The point I'm trying to make is that epistemic injustice has affected many groups in many ways across the millennia, and the obvious epistemic injustice against old women illustrated in Malleus Maleficarum should prompt modern rationalists to consider whether other groups are being similarly wronged today.
Pray tell me more about the human domestic animals. I've read some stuff around fetish sites, so I'm not entirely sure you're not talking about the whole furry/hucows/other weird stuff content.
Unless you mean the humanised rats with brain tissue? That is a good debate to be had about creating chimeras with human brain tissue, and how far we can go with that before they do reach a level of "more human than non-human".
Humans are animals, and we're often considered to have "self-domesticated" in the course of hominid evolution (https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21777). Hence, you and I are human domestic animals.
The Pasca lab's fascinating new protocol doesn't result in any behavioral or cognitive changes in the rats, at least according to the results they chose to publish; if true, this outcome provides strong evidence that human cognition isn't based on any special cell-intrinsic properties, consistent with many prior electrophysiological results. In my opinion, this should update us even further towards thinking that the experiences that make our lives meaningful are fundamentally commensurable with those of other vertebrates, and also allay concerns that human brain organoids have any kind of consciousness above, at most, what you'd expect from an animal with a badly malformed peppercorn-sized brain.
Being a member of a family is not the same thing as being a cow in a herd, so while "nonhuman domestic animal" may be a cute phrase, it's not anything other than trying to give pets the same moral weight and value as humans.
I wouldn't phrase it exactly the same way, but I also felt uneasy through this admittedly hilarious article. Scott empathizes strongly with the guy who apparently had peers acknowledging plausible alternative theories re the prevalence and truth of witch accusations, and which would have resulted in less torture and murder, but chose to ignore them. That's... Very generous, but certainly seems to be throwing weight behind a guy for, who his time, would have been equivalent to rejecting the rationalist school of thought. I am swayed by rationalist arguments, they give me the strength to doubt myself and acknowledge future worlds may laugh at my idiocy. But they also give me the strength to call out intellectual laziness for the harm it does. Dunno why it's given such a pass here. Scott, give yourself credit, you are way better than this guy, and it's ok to say he didn't try hard enough to not advocate for torture and murder of marginalized women.
There's a common pattern of thinking that when others don't agree with your point of view, it's just because they haven't you've read, either because they've never come across the material or have deliberately avoided it.
Scott has indeed addressed many woke claims in the past. And when he did, there was often a chorus of wokists saying "you're OBSESSED with this subject, this is just an unimportant culture war nonsense, blah blah blah."
I dunno. I don't disagree with you on the basic point (you have to really listen to other viewpoints to be sure you're not falling prey to your own individual or cultural blindnesses), but the argument would be a lot more powerful if people writing about "epistemic injustice" and "antiblackness" and "patriarchal systems" were actually excluded and rare minority voices -- instead of, as they actually are, quite loud voices that it's pretty much impossible *not* to hear in contemporary Western culture.
One would also like to see just a tad more of the shoe on the other foot, too, meaning the people writing about systemic racism and the patriarchy taking some clear time to listen to voices unfamliar to *them* who see things differently. That would also make the argument more persuasive as representing "we should all be fairer" as opposed to "my group isn't getting enough attention."
But as I said, I agree on the basic point. I guess I'm just not persuaded this is offered in a genuine spirit of open and even-handed inquiry. Too many negative experiences with people saying similar things, I guess.
A more concise rephrasing of my frustration with ACX could be: while the community prides itself on engaging rationally with ideas on their own terms no matter the source, and indeed does a better job of this than most epistemic communities, there's a general refusal to engage meaningfully with "woke"-coded thinkers (i.e. critical and feminist theorists)—a painfully ironic form of willful ignorance given that, in my experience, the latter group is more genuinely committed to engaging deeply and fairly with ideas they strongly oppose.
I agree with you about rationalist epistemic closure, but I don't think basically everybody wants to be rational. People want to be happy, they want to be rich, they want to get laid, they want children or grandchildren, they want to eat a lot of tasty food without getting fat, they want a hundred other things.
Rationality's kind of a niche taste. Most people are a lot less interested in understanding the truth of the universe than they are in the more common goals evolution would predict.
I think it tends to appeal to people with less pressing concerns (if you're worried about feeding your family you're not going to be worried about rationality) and thus wealthier, who have reached past success using the 'rational' parts of their brain (artists and fashion designers are going to rely more heavily on intuition and so things like this will be less appealing to them), and who are uncomfortable with the current direction of academia (this could be for various reasons but given the extreme left swing of academia this is going to attract a lot of rightists of various stripes)...but also find the macho posturings of far-right figures like Bronze Age Pervert unattractive. (Though I'm sure he has a couple of fans here, and you could definitely mix both approaches.)
Demographically, white (some Asian, plenty of Jewish) males in the right two political quadrants on the compass, particularly bottom right, with STEMish interests.
In short, I think it's just another identity politics...but it's an identity I share, so I support it. Everyone else from BIPOCs to Christian Nationalists is organizing to support their people, why shouldn't we?
I generally have not found the last bit to be the case, but you of course may have different experiences.
I think the thing is a lot of rationalists have had bad experiences with 'woke'-coded thinkers and are coming to blogs like this to get away from that. Also, in a lot of ways 'woke' theory leads to affirmative action, and most rationalists are negatively impacted by that personally.
IMHO it's motivated reasoning all the way down on every side; everyone fights for their tribe, rationality's just the way we lawyer for our group, however we wind up defining that. You count up your identities and you pick a side. If you're cross-pressured, maybe you opt out or pick the one you feel is less offensive.
I appreciate that, and I actually 100% agree that anyone able to publish an academic critical theory book is not a "marginalized voice", certainly not the way 15th-century old German peasant women were marginalized. This is a much-discussed fact/paradox in this literature; it's the main topic of Spivak's famous essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" The conflation of the marginalized with the "pro-marginalized" is all too common on both sides, and there's a great leftist book making the rounds called "Elite Capture", about how many progressive efforts to "center the most marginalized" actually end up centering, like, Ivy League Ph.D.s of color instead of people in refugee camps.
I think the review would have benefited from including actual primary-source perspectives (e.g. court depositions) from witch-hunt victims, but I think it needs to engage with the feminist epistemology literature for a different reason. These theorists have thought very deeply about the failure mode in which low-status people get screwed because high-status Independent Thinkers don't treat their views and knowledge as worthy of serious consideration; this is exactly the failure that led Kramer to think it was a moral imperative to burn innocent people to death en masse, so if I started noticing commonalities between my intellectual project and his, I'd want to check out these people's opinion of where he went wrong.
I would certainly have described myself as a feminist in 1975, but the movement long ago became corrupt and dysfunctional, and now bears no clear connection at all to the advancement of the interests of women in general.
I don't blame anyone born after 1990 who finds "feminist" more the label of a certain stripe of social revolutionary than descriptive of a person committed to the legal equality and equal opportunity of the sexes.
The feminist movement is not a monolith; it's decentralized and full of internal debates between different schools.
It sounds like you agree with the principles of liberal feminism, which holds that the movement should work towards legal and economic sex equality, instead of something more exotic like gender abolition or restructuring the family unit. This is a perfectly respectable position, and it doesn't seem rationally necessary to give up on fighting for these goals just because radical, Marxist, and intersectional feminists also exist and have different priorities.
Very strange comment. Kramer, a man who believes that old ladies with cats and brooms are a great diabolical menace is a rationalist, therefore rationalists should read “patriarchal systems of knowledge production” lest they start a witch-hunt.
Yes, I did not express this very well. As Scott himself recognizes, Kramer is a man engaged in a project that fits with the "rationalist" approach: he's taking a commonly-held belief seriously, and trying to develop a comprehensive logical theory of how all the relevant observations could make sense. He makes an apparently honest effort, but crucially he's fatally flawed by his inability or refusal to give proper respect to the knowledge of marginalized individuals, especially when this knowledge isn't considered worthy of being entered into the "respectable" literature.
For example, midwives could tell him that pregnancy and childbirth are inherently dangerous, and that even with the best perinatal care available in 15th-century Germany babies will sometimes come out stillborn and with gross malformations, and in these cases there's nothing to do except try to dispose of the body ASAP before someone accuses you of witchcraft. But even if anyone dared try to enter this fact into the public record, Kramer would be unduly prejudiced against it, based largely on the social position of the person making the claim (this should be pretty uncontroversial based on what he says about women).
If rationalists want to avoid falling into similar traps, they should be genuinely interested in reading critical analysis about how prevalent this kind of societal epistemic bias is, and how to recognize it. Insofar as rationalists dismiss this literature out of hand because it has the word "patriarchal" in it, I don't trust rationalists to learn from Kramer's example.
Probably late to the party, but Kramer was not what I’d call a decent or reasonable guy. Ask Helena Scheuberin, the woman he tried for witchcraft in Innsbruck. She was acquitted, and then Kramer stalked her. Even in the 15th century, a court ordered him to stop harassing her and the bishop threw him out of the city. And then shortly thereafter he wrote the “Malleus Maleficarum”.
I love this video for making me realize that witches and werewolves were intertwined more than I realized, and much MUCH further back than I’d thought. Also fascinating: the people who believed they transformed into spectral werewolves to fight witches in their dreams.
The line between religion, magic and what most people considered empirical reality was just drawn differently in the past. One of the best books I’ve ever read was historian Keith Thomas’s seminal treatise “Religion and the Decline of Magic”. The most relevant part to this post might be the background on folk magic. This was *everywhere*, and just pervaded every aspect of life, sometimes so tightly interwoven with official Christianity that it could not be distinguished. But then some significant social, demographic and technological shifts occurred that created a lot more instability and uncertainty. There were suddenly a lot people who just didn’t fit into social structures that had previously provided for just a few oddballs and misfits. Practices that had just been endemic “white magic” suddenly became suspect.
According to family lore, my own great-great-grandmother was a bit of a “Strega”, an Italian folk witch. But what women like her were doing in a chaotic and rapidly depopulating Southern Italy at the end of the 19th century was magic with a distinctly Catholic character. Folk religious practices didn’t get quite the same scouring in Italy and Southern Europe as they did further from the Holy See, almost as if the Church tended to look out past the foot of the Vatican wall. Once arrived in the US, more dogmatic German and Northern European Catholics were largely horrified at all the weird stuff going on in Italian immigrant neighborhoods that called itself Catholicism. Italians quickly dropped a lot of it in the name of both assimilation and modernity.
I knew my ancestors made wax effigies of body parts as offerings to thank the Virgin Mary for healing them, but I was shocked to find you can still do this at the hugely popular Catholic shrine at Fatima in Portugal. If you think the Virgin helped cure your breast cancer, you can buy a wax boob at the gift shop and toss it in a giant oven designated for this purpose. I can only assume that plenty of the millions of Catholics who visit annually find this creepy and weird and not Catholic at all, but it’s countenanced. For now.
Is praying to saints for a sick child over a bowl of holy water and olive oil Christianity or occultism? My ancestors probably didn’t consider that witchcraft at all in 1900, but my mother would have by 1960. If they’d been German instead of Italian a few centuries earlier, they might have been burned for it. Like everything else, it all depends on the incentives of the people around you.
" I can only assume that plenty of the millions of Catholics who visit annually find this creepy and weird and not Catholic at all, but it’s countenanced. For now."
It depends, modern Catholicism (yeah, I'm going to go "post-Vatican II") probably would be deeply embarrassed about the redneck aunties and grannies doing this. I'd go "Huh, odd, but whatever, now I gotta go tie a black cloth on the front door on the eve of St Brigid's Day to use to cure headaches because my grandfather swore by this".
I think it's no coincidence that the Hammer of Witches came about right after the revolutionary introduction of the printing press. The medieval inquisitions weren't exactly softball but they were much more restrained than the excesses of the early modern period and I think we have to credit the scholastics running the Catholic church for keeping things in bounds and mostly not letting things degenerate in neighbors using the process to settle grudges with each other.
I can't believe nobody has mentioned Béatrice de Planisolles yet
A famous French heretic from a bit earlier in the middle ages. Her Inquisition interview is frankly hilarious ("... the spiciest, juiciest inquisition I have ever had the pleasure to read. She managed to acquired as her lovers most of the top heretics in 14th century southern France, all of whom were listed in the interview, btw, which made it so spicy..") and strongly suggests that, yes, everybody was doing "witchcraft" (as in folk magic) back then.
We made fun of "dormitive potency" not for being false but for being tautological -- it's like saying "poppies can make you sleepy because they have the ability of making people sleepy", just in fancier words.
No, but they could have said "opium makes you sleep for unknown reasons", which would have been more honest and not actually any less informative. See Feynman about triboluminescence, etc.
(anyway, not really "medieval", it's a fictional doctor from a 17th-century comedy)
> It would seem that witches can steal your penis.
As we all know, "penis" can be used as a metaphor for masculinity, and correspondingly also as a metaphor for rationality, e.g. in discussion of how "masculine modes of understanding" forcibly impose and insert themselves on and into the emotional realities of The Other. Therefore, "stealing a penis" can be understood as removing or hindering the victim's ability to be rational, detached, and analytical, and thus by contrast enhancing their emotional volatility. Possibly in general, and possibly on certain specific topics.
> WHICH BY THE WAY MEANS THAT THE F@#KING INQUISITION HAS MORE PRINCIPLES THAN THE NEW YORK TIMES.
Now, I'm not *saying* that a certain NYT writer is a witch, but...
Quasi related twitter thread that went viral last week saying that the theory that witches were pagan wise women persecuted by the catholic church was popularized by Himmler https://twitter.com/suzania/status/1584893372376166405
> there’s a very narrow band between “God restrains the Devil so much that witchcraft can’t exist” and “God restrains the Devil so little that witches have already taken over the world”. Prima facie, we wouldn’t expect the amount God restrains the Devil to fall into this little band.
I read this and I immediately thought of the Anthropic Principle and why it is such an unsatisfying explanation. Indeed, the argument Kramer uses to defend this position kind of looks like the anthropic principle if you squint a bit. If God let the devil kill everyone, then we wouldn't be alive to praise him, so of course God places limits on the devil. Meanwhile, there's evil in the world - we can clearly observe that - therefore we know God allows it.
Compare this to the anthropic principle: If there was no life on the Earth, we wouldn't be around to observe it, so of course we should expect to be on a planet that has life on it - same principle if you want to extend to 'intelligent life'. We don't observe intelligent life elsewhere, indeed we observe that the conditions for its existence (whether at a universal scale or below) are pretty narrow, so we must live in a world/universe in which life can exist.
For me, this explanation has the same lack of convincing power, whether applied to witches/the existence of evil, or to any other attempt at explaining the world as we know it.
The difference as I see it is that life on earth is indeed possible, we only invoke the anthropic principle because it's unlikely. Witchcraft (at least, with our knowledge of the world) is impossible, so anthropic principle logic does not apply.
ModernObserver: Witchcraft is impossible, so therefore your arguments about how God must be assumed to allow it are bunk.
Kramer: My book is well-sourced with clear examples of witchcraft, confessions of witches, etc. I have a lot of strong evidence that witchcraft exists.
ModernObserver: But we took the last half-millennium to prove that you're actually misinterpreting all that evidence! We can now explain everything without resorting to witchcraft or to the kind or argument you're making.
Kramer: And what argument are you currently using to explain the nature of existence as you observe it?
ModernObserver: The anthropic principle. [Explains the principle.] Sure it sounds similar to what you put forward, but the difference is that we know the observations it's based on are solid. (No intelligent life elsewhere, the conditions for existence reside within a narrow band that is otherwise unexplained through some forcing principle.) Therefore it's not a problem to invoke the anthropic principle. This is different from how your explanations for why God allows witchcraft were pure Tomfoolery.
Kramer: Let's come back to this in another five hundred years, shall we?
More seriously, I think the observations the anthropic principle are based on are at least as tenuous as the ones witchcraft was based on. Perhaps more so.
There's this thing that's unexplained: the universe appears fine-tuned. That's weird, because the exact numbers seem arbitrary, but the question of why universal constants are what they are is kind of metaphysical.
There's this rush to explain it: God did it. See, THIS is where we can finally observe His hand directly at work!
There's a reaction: no, it's still random.
How?
Well, there's an infinite number of universes out there, which allows us to hypothesize that randomness eventually produces a universe where life exists. AP explains that we're only observing it in a universe where life is possible.
A much better response would be to say that we don't yet understand how our observations could have arisen naturally. That doesn't mean we'll never understand it, nor does it mean we must admit we've observed the hand of God at work here. Indeed, no positive evidence in favor of the direct action of God has been put forward at this point.
We have an open question. Why fill the void with sophistry instead of waiting for more evidence? Arguments along the line of the infinite universes/AP potentially blind us to a legitimate search for a forcing mechanism that might explain our observations at some future point. The principle of universal gravitation eventually helped explain the formation of stars and galaxies without requiring the direct hand of God in every act of celestial creation. There's likely some principle explaining the formation of matter in the universe, a principle we've not identified yet. Claiming "it's all random" is as bad, IMO, as claiming "God did it directly" in disincentivizing the scientific search for understanding. Both come with no proof, and (in the case of AP) are supported by surprisingly similar philosophical arguments.
The anthropic principle doesn't apply to things that we merely clearly observe. It only applies to things whose negation would be impossible to observe. And even then, it only explains why we observe the universe set up a certain way and our position in it - effects do still have causes within the universe.
Strictly-speaking, the anthropic principle can't be invoked to explain the existence of life on Earth, but merely explains the existence of *intelligence* on Earth - you can theoretically have an intelligence that is not biologically alive. You have to get the rest of the way with other arguments (e.g. "the self-organising nature of life is the easiest way to make an intelligence without another intelligence designing it").
I'll agree with the minor correction that the anthropic principle technically only applies to intelligent life, but I still don't see how AP can be invoked to 'explain' anything. The supposed explanatory assertion of AP is my biggest beef with the idea. It is as useless at explaining intelligence as invoking God is to explain the at-that-time apparent observation of the existence of witchcraft.
(Would that some intrepid philosopher had rejected the anthropic principle of witchcraft - theopic principle? - and dug deeper to explain all those 'witchcraft' observations through some other principle.)
It's the same whether applied to witches or intelligence. It explains AWAY an observation that is otherwise inconvenient for current theory, more than providing the kind of testable explanation we normally like to build scientific theories on. I'm not saying that untestable explanations of observational evidence can never be *correct*. I'm saying they should be suspect insofar as they explain away inconvenient observations. Especially since so many scientific discoveries have been made by digging at observations that are insufficiently explained by current theory. We dismiss observational evidence through clever hand-waving at our peril.
Hi -- saw your result on the ACX grants. Can't find another way of contacting you. I'm working on roostrent.com, a georgsit startup aiming to buy-all-the-land using co-ops (disintermediate all the agents, use the increased margins to get investors to agree to rent controls). £36k ARR, preseed round now, 53 units.
This is a funny follow up to the meditation post, since I view “a witch took my penis” and “I experienced jhana” as pretty similar claims. But in both cases I am very interested in why the person makes that claim. Both seem obviously absurd to me, yet people clearly do and did claim them, so I want to know what is going on to make them do so.
I would’ve guessed the anecdote about the parish priest’s schwanz to be a joke, but I don’t know enough about how they viewed priests and celibacy in the Germanic lands of that day so I may be reading too much into it.
Well, this comment of mine is probably one post too late but I'd assume jhana is something one could spot via EEG, blood flow or somesuch: it's just a flow state but over extreme concentration directed towards the internal rather than external, a sort of a benevolent mental glitch where your internal reward signal wraps in on itself.
You perfect that and you feel that reward signal for focusing on focusing on focusing... and so on, till you manage to feel relaxed while focused which sounds contradictory but isn't that much weirder to me than say the 'third hand illusion'.
The problem with meditation is that many people generally are intuitively averse to unnatural mental states and the notion that cognition has 'bugs' one can exploit - just because that very premise hints at how our brains are not as infallible as we'd like to believe.
I'd say it's the same 'fear of the unknown' just pointed in a different direction, lots of mental states exist that we don't bother naming and that's just one of those.
And one more thought: besides the socio-cultural, there is a psychological and even a psychiatric component to the occult, the religious and meditation at large.
I don't believe in anything supernatural but all these attempt to invoke uncommon mental states for different purposes but all of them would seem exotic and difficult to explain if experienced sparingly: intense faith is nigh indistinguishable from extreme focus save for the internal explanations one has and both give rise to states that aren't something evolution would have done anything about.
E.g. one of the common Buddhist meditation methods involves guiding oneself into a temporary MDD-like state over a few days by internally interrupting any flow state by deliberately noticing each action you'd take. It's beneficial to an extent but it's a bit hard to imagine anyone stumbling onto it by accident without first being surrounded by a specific kind of a civilization.
And in modernity, it's hard to sell someone on being temporarily depressed just for insight over what depression is and how to use it for productivity(!).
I am amusing myself by reading this an mentally replacing "witches" with "AGI".
Whatever else you are concerned about, there is no way it is anywhere close to as bad as AGI. If you had the faintest idea how bad AGI really is, you would be freaking out all the time. You need to stop whatever you were doing before and become some kind of AGI-minimizer instead.
Joseph Glanvill because a member of the Royal Society in 1664, when the Royal Society was only 4 years old (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellow_of_the_Royal_Society). He was one of leading advocates for science in the later seventeenth century.
He also wrote a book about the experimental evidence for witches, called Saducismus triumphatus, or, Full and plain evidence concerning witches and apparitions. From the Preface:
"I have no humour nor delight in telling Stories, and do not publish these for the gratification of those that have; but I record them as Arguments for the confirmation of a Truth which hath indeed been attested by multitudes of the like Evidences in all places and times. But things remote, or long past, are either not believed or forgotten: whereas these being fresh and near, and attended with all the circumstances of credibility it may be expected they should have the more success upon the obstinacy of Unbelievers.
But after all this, I must confess, there is one Argument against me, which is not to be dealt with, viz. a mighty confidence grounded upon nothing, that swaggers, and huffs, and swears there are no Witches. For such Philosophers as these, let them enjoy the Opinion of their own Superlative Judgements, and enter me in the first rank of Fools for crediting my Senses, and those of all the World, before their sworn Dictates. If they will believe in Scott, Hobbes, and Osborne, and think them more infallible than the Sacred Oracles, the History of all Ages, and the full experience of our own, who can help it?"
I wonder if there were contemporaries that pointed out the huge problems with torture as a proof method.
That one doesn't seem to rely on unintuitive psych theory regarding true confessions and false confessions, the unreliability of memory and such, just common sense.
Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic but I feel like even in the 15th century I would have been able to see the problems with it torture, if not witchcraft.
I wrote about the Malleus Maleficarum a couple weeks ago, as an example of the annoying kind of dystopian literature... the kind that serves as self-pitying war propaganda for the powerful: a shrill compendium of elite grievances; a comically grim warning that anyone who ignores their noble demands may threaten our cherished hegemonic norms. The whiney excuses of unstable critics who have accidentally found themselves in power.
What I found interesting was that the book begins by claiming that rampant unchecked witchcraft could soon cause the apocalypse; it then includes a papal bull granting priests the “full and entire liberty” to stamp out sorcery, followed by a notarized statement of unanimous support by the local university’s doctors of theology. Next there’s an extended section criticizing any clergymen who doubt the widespread reality of this crime. Only after all this throat-clearing do we get the diagnostic manual and the trial guide, with clear step-by-step instructions on how to identify and prosecute such supposedly overbearing menaces. (Of course, the author’s real issue lay with insufficiently zealous bureaucrats, who had exiled him from his parish for obsessing over one particular acquitted woman’s alleged promiscuity). It's as if the author is saying, "Look, witch-lovers, everyone important and powerful agrees that we really need to do something about this right now, because otherwise nobody will ever do anything to stop it!”
The same basic story describes Matthew Hopkins, an itinerant witch-finder who during England’s revolution through some depraved spell-work single-handedly hexed more than a hundred souls gallows-ward for witchcraft, for social stability. (England as a whole hunted fewer witches through the entire prior century combined than he did in just three years, because this whiney degenerate kind of cultural coordination can be quite angrily powerful).
Modern-day analogues are almost too obvious to mention. You can make a decent career out of anti-fascistically whipping up mobs against whoever might harbor some pre-smartphone conservative sentiments, since those reactionary extremists existentially threaten us now: just look at how disagreeable and low-status the self-identified right-wingers have become, ever since we’ve thoroughly stigmatized their beliefs… do you really think such dinosaurs are worth defending? Likewise, during the Salem trials—which ironically occurred when the King revoked all Massachusetts law, leaving litigants without a judge’s firm paternalistic limits—one chorus of attention-seeking teenage girls cried out “me too!” every time that any of them claimed to have been victimized by someone else’s problematic behavior; each defendant who confessed and then blamed others for seeming similarly witchy got pardoned, while those who refused to play along died. Unfortunately I can’t think of any modern-day analogues to this, but Arthur Miller’s famous play about it apparently allegorized a “red scare,” during which an uncouth populist senator tried investigating some of the countless communist spies now known to have utterly infested our postwar government (though I’m sure that having to testify before congress about your own alleged treason would have seemed scary and, moreover, inconvenient, especially for those whom they caught red-handed). Etc.
My post mostly tries to flesh out what's wrong with this kind of fundamentally disingenuous and cowardly dystopian literature, and gesture towards what more honest political horror could look like. Ultimately, I argue that generative language models will rapidly worsen this YA-ification of power: the tendency to endow victimhood and weakness with moral status, and for power to speak in such a wheedling cowardly voice.
I once dated a girl who prayed for bad things to happen to her roommate when she was pissed at her roommate and then bad things did happen to her roommate. She was dead seriously convinced she had some witch/occult power of making holy curses.
We all thought she was crazy, and I am SUPER glad I never knocked her up.
Late Prof. Marvin Harris (great anthropologist, "hated" by Steven Pinker - long story, mainly about Napoleon Chagnon) - had a fine fun-theory about witches: Hardly any were hunted and burnt during the middle ages, when THE church was strong, but after 1500 (during the "Neuzeit"/"modern era") during a time, when the church(es) had to justify their role. Defending us from those evil witches was a great way to do this. So they did. Luther as eager to burn them as any pope in Rome. - see the excellent book: "Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches. The Riddles of Culture"
"Of the 141 entries featuring witches, 40 of them deal with hags taking on the form of hares when trying to escape from farmers who catch them sucking milk from their cows’ udders.
The information is presented in factual and specific form: Mrs Paddy Brady from Kilteane, Co Cavan, reports that she "knows of a woman who turned herself into a hare. Her name was Mrs Hutchington, a Protestant woman who lived in the townland of Ryeforth, Co Cavan. She went to my grandfather, Bennie Goldrick, and sucked the milk from the cow. Grandfather saw her; he got his gun loaded it with a crucked [sic] sixpence, fired at the hare and hit her on the head. She ran away, and he ran after her to her house, where he found the woman in the bed with her head bleeding. He made her promise to never do that again, so she did not." An addendum tells that a crooked threepenny or sixpenny piece was used since only a silver bullet had the power to kill a witch-hare."
This is, admittedly, a little bit off-topic, but I feel that, every time somebody cites the Spanish Inquisition and witches in the same article, a little bit of historical context should be added. It's worth reflecting on the fact that, according to the latest estimates, in Europe in the Modern Age some 50,000 witches were burned: half in the German territories, 4,000 in Switzerland, 1,500 in England, 4,000 in France. In Spain, the witch victims of the Inquisition were 27 in total, including all the imperial territories, according to its exhaustive historical archives (in a recent study in Catalonia -- https://www.abc.es/espana/catalunya/abci-parlamento-catalan-indulta-mujeres-ajusticiadas-brujeria-202201261825_noticia.html -- there are more examples, but the vast majority were victims of neighborhood vendettas, often after being exonerated, rather than accused, by the Inquisition). Witches and witch-hunting are a northern European obsession and specialty, inherited by countries with a majority of northern European settlers, like the US, and any reference in this context to the Spanish Inquisition should be, if anything, praiseworthy.
Shocked because it argues that the 'the spanish Inquisition' and the catholic church did pretty much the opposite of what I had always read - that they were enthusiastic witch-burners - and instead, generally acted to cool mobs who were eager to burn 'em witches. Quoting some early christian laws and texts that declared that it's *Pagans* who believe in witchcraft - it's all a deception by the Devil, and that it is **accusations of witchcraft** that are to be punished. There are also descriptions of the Inquisition recognizing that there are witch crazes and the thing to do is to stop the "conspiracy theories" from spreading, keep a cool head and let it die down; of the Inquisition intervening in a witch craze to claim THEY are the only ones with jurisdiction to judge witchcraft cases, only to then refuse to carry them on.
For a Theory 3, the descriptions of the rituals, spells, covens, etcetera around witches & witchcraft sounds like the kind of thing that all modern tumblr-witches I've known would have been super into. Cults have had a draw forever, and witch covens sound here like a cult where you get to participate in cool rituals & ceremonies, you get to have sex with people in a sexually repressed society, and you also get supposed magic powers, then it would surprise me if there were not real people who were in real witchcraft cults who thought they were real witches.
I’d go much stronger on the hypothesis that some people were really trying to do witchcraft. Essentially everybody in medieval Europe was doing magic, carrying around charms and doing garbled Latin incantations and such for good health, to get pregnant, whatever. A lot of this was tolerated by the decadent pre-Reformation church as long as there was a veneer of the magic being powered by Jesus. So it’s really a very small jump from superstitious use of charmed saints’ bones to trying to invoke the really good stuff via Satan, and I’m sure it was very common for people to slip this way. Keith Thomas’”Religion and the Decline of Magic” is a great treatment of how this background shifted from late medieval to early modern times in England.
Reading the accounts of penis theft, I wonder whether it was basically an elaborate excuse for handjobs. Imagine that a man paid a prostitute to commit this act (perhaps hoping to avoid pregnancy) but got caught. "Um...actually she was just a witch restoring the penis she stole!" If other people in the village didn't like her (including perhaps the man's wife), they might go along with this weird story as a way to justify bringing down the force of the church on her head. I'm not sure if this is compatible with accounts of penis theft in other cultures, though.
> His arguments ring hollow to modern ears, and honestly neither God nor the Devil comes out looking very good. God isn’t trying to maximize a 21st century utilitarian view of the Good, He’s trying to maximize His own glory. Allowing some evil helps with this, because then He can justly punish it (and being just is glorious) or mercifully forgive it (and being merciful is also glorious). But, if God let the Devil kill everyone in the world, then there would be no one left to praise God’s glory, plus people might falsely think God couldn’t have stopped the Devil if he’d wanted to. So the glory-maximizing option is to give the Devil some power, but not too much.
This is the most convincing argument I've seen for Theodicy, although it does mean giving up the claim that god is pure good.
I like the empathy towards the witch hunters in this review, who I think often get a bad rap from modern audiences. In the medieval world, it’s not like the choices were between witch trials and modern jurisprudence, it was much more likely a choice between mob rule and royal/church abuse of power. Witch trials were a form of due process, as you point out, by people who didn’t understand very much about the world.
My only remark is to regret the number of people who have come to see this Malleus Maleficarum by Kramer as the text that defines the christians' views of witches and witchcraft.
It seems clear to me that Kramer was an angry crank subject to a variant of the 80s-era satanism scare (in addition to being apparently a swindler). The one case of him actually trying witches, in the city of Innsbruck, went down in flames, resulting in no convictions, and the bishop of Brixen ordering him to stop pestering the good citizens of Innsbruck and get the fuck out of town.
Frustrated and angry, he wrote this book to explain his views, that were antithetical to what had long been the mainstream view of witches among learned christians, the long-held traditional Catholic law, the Canon Episcopi, that considered witchcraft a delusion (cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Episcopi). Contemporaries like Ulrich Molitor, Jean Vincent or Nicholas of Cusa were skeptical and laid back about witches. On this I could suggest
I'd recommend Huysman's novel, "Là-Bas", published in 1891 and a glorious, over-sensationalised, mess of a book about modern-day (for the day) occultism and black magic in Paris. Being French, he opens the book with a harangue about modern literature and the school of Naturalism 😀
A rather stodgy 1928 English translation here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14323/14323-h/14323-h.htm
"Certainly if naturalism confined one to monotonous studies of mediocre persons and to interminable inventories of the objects in a drawing-room or a landscape, an honest and clear-sighted artist would soon cease to produce, and a less conscientious workman would be under the necessity of repeating himself over and over again to the point of nausea. Nevertheless Durtal could see no possibilities for the novelist outside of naturalism. Were we to go back to the pyrotechnics of romanticism, rewrite the lanuginous works of the Cherbuliez and Feuillet tribe, or, worse yet, imitate the lachrymose storiettes of Theuriet and George Sand? Then what was to be done? And Durtal, with desperate determination, set to work sorting out a tangle of confused theories and inchoate postulations. He made no headway. He felt but could not define. He was afraid to. Definition of his present tendencies would plump him back into his old dilemma.
"We must," he thought, "retain the documentary veracity, the precision of detail, the compact and sinewy language of realism, but we must also dig down into the soul and cease trying to explain mystery in terms of our sick senses. If possible the novel ought to be compounded of two elements, that of the soul and that of the body, and these ought to be inextricably bound together as in life. Their interreactions, their conflicts, their reconciliation, ought to furnish the dramatic interest. In a word, we must follow the road laid out once and for all by Zola, but at the same time we must trace a parallel route in the air by which we may go above and beyond.... A spiritual naturalism! It must be complete, powerful, daring in a different way from anything that is being attempted at present. Perhaps as approaching my concept I may cite Dostoyevsky. Yet that exorable Russian is less an elevated realist than an evangelic socialist. In France right now the purely corporal recipe has brought upon itself such discredit that two clans have arisen: the liberal, which prunes naturalism of all its boldness of subject matter and diction in order to fit it for the drawing-room, and the decadent, which gets completely off the ground and raves incoherently in a telegraphic patois intended to represent the language of the soul—intended rather to divert the reader's attention from the author's utter lack of ideas. As for the right wing verists, I can only laugh at the frantic puerilities of these would-be psychologists, who have never explored an unknown district of the mind nor ever studied an unhackneyed passion. They simply repeat the saccharine Feuillet and the saline Stendhal. Their novels are dissertations in school-teacher style. They don't seem to realize that there is more spiritual revelation in that one reply of old Hulot, in Balzac's Cousine Bette, 'Can't I take the little girl along?' than in all their doctoral theses. We must expect of them no idealistic straining toward the infinite. For me, then, the real psychologist of this century is not their Stendhal but that astonishing Ernest Hello, whose unrelenting unsuccess is simply miraculous!"
He began to think that Des Hermies was right. In the present disorganized state of letters there was but one tendency which seemed to promise better things. The unsatisfied need for the supernatural was driving people, in default of something loftier, to spiritism and the occult."
I wouldn't be surprised if they take it up now that Scott's posted about it. There will probably have to be a few intervening posters/twitterers given how unpopular Scott is with the social-justice left, but the BDSM jokes write themselves.
The last question (why do smart people believe in witches) is something that I think I have some small amount of experience with, given that I dated a girl whose family members had been accused of witchcraft and who had accused others of being witches in turn. Her family lived in semi-rural Nigeria, and witchcraft accusations are both common and taken incredibly seriously there.
As far as I can tell, witchcraft accusations in Nigeria seemed to be an excuse to do something terrible to the other person. It was a sort of casus belli in a world in which the law was incredibly unreliable and also didn't reflect societal norms. So, a guy who regularly doesn't pay his workers could be called a witch, and then it'd be societally appropriate to run him out of the village. Or, if a woman sleeps with your husband, she's a witch, and then you can go to her house with your relatives and start shit.
What was especially weird from my perspective is that everyone kind of knew it was bullshit, but it was really convenient. Also, people who did what we would normally consider witchcraft, like curses for hire or prognostication, rebranded themselves as prophets in the Christian tradition and so didn't get in trouble.
I had a really hard time convincing my then girlfriend that the whole witchcraft thing was terrible societally, even though she didn't believe in it (although she believed in the existence of black magic/Satanic stuff more broadly). I think mob justice is honestly just a really useful way of getting shit done, and in the absence of fact finding/depositions, it's tough to prove things even if you know it's true. Like, if you catch a person red-handed stealing, you don't need to call them a witch. You just grab them, haul them out in public, and tire them. It's horrific but it stops people from stealing.
But, if a building collapses and your brother dies, you can get together with your relatives, decide who to blame (the owner? the engineer?), then mutually decide there's some kind of witchcraft and feel fully justified in beating the shit out of him. This would also make it difficult for his relatives to retaliate unless they can prove he wasn't a witch/didn't deserve the beating. I figure there was probably a similar thing going on in rural England in the 1500s.
"Magic, Explanations, and Evil: The Origins and Design of Witches and Sorcerers", Singh 2021 https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/2021-singh.pdf
A guy I knew from Ghana told me that his sister was killed by a witch. Evidence: his sister's leg got swollen and, lacking the money for the hospital, they took her to a witch doctor. The doctor pulled pins out of her leg (worth pointing out this is a classic of sleight-of-hand street magic) and said they'd been put there by a witch. She died a bit later, in her 30s. He concluded the story by saying "I know you don't believe in witches" and I was like it's not like I don't believe in witches, I just think it sounds more like her leg was infected and he was like maybe, but there was no money for the hospital, so what difference does it make? And I was like, damn, good point.
it makes a huge difference.
I doubt he is in any hurry to fund hospitals if y'know, a witch did it.
"Fund hospitals"? This is Ghana, not a ballot prop in Montgomery County, Maryland.
Ghana has the 10th highest GDP in Africa. They do fund hospitals — though not in rural areas, according to my quick googling.
Still, it doesn't take the Mayo clinic to be able to say "Hey, your wound is infected, here's some antibiotics". I don't have any medical training whatsoever but I like to think I could practice medicine at that sort of level.
Antibiotics aren't prohibitively expensive in Africa either according to this paper I spent thirty seconds reading https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6946586/
Even so, a country that believes in infections will act differently than a country that believes in witches; and on a personal level, one might avoid wasting money on pin-pulling and instead spend some on disinfectants or cleaning the wound.
I think you will find very different levels of witchcraft in rural and urban Ghana.
That is a story my late mother told me years ago about her father. When he was a boy, he struck or hit or kicked or otherwise meddled with a black dog (see here for why that is a bad idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_dog_(folklore)
His leg swelled up and he was confined to bed. I don't know if his parents tried seeking a doctor, but anyway they did get the local cunning man/quack doctor in. He said something over the leg (charms, prayers, who knows?) and took 'things' out of it - yes, your basic psychic surgery as above.
Grandad got better. Since the witch tradition is weak in Ireland, this wasn't considered witchcraft nor the practitioner a witch; he was the 'quack doctor', that is, the local wise man with cures for things conventional medicine couldn't touch, like being fairy struck.
My wife has an interesting story from living in Ukraine. Her Grandmother told her she was a practicing witch, but one of the good ones. My wife doesn't really believe in her stories, but her witchcraft is one of the only things she got from her grandmother, so she hasn't abandoned it completely.
And as far as the Grandmother being a witch, one, it was probably past down to her similarly, and two, she lived through both the Holocaust and Holodomor. She couldn't practice her religion, so it's not surprising she clinged to something spiritual.
For a more or less contemporary response (okay, less, it was published in 1584, a century later), I recommend Reginald Scot's _The Discoverie of Witchcraft_. It's just as detailed, just as carefully researcher, and just as fascinating in is coverage of beliefs about magic and witchcraft. But Scot takes some of the devout Christianity, and some of the belief in magic (he thinks astrology is legit), and mixes in a strong streak of recognizably modern skepticism. So against the idea that Kramer is just a reasonable person going along with what seem like reasonable beliefs at the time, there's the example of Scot. He has basically the same set of evidence to work with and some of the same baseline beliefs, but he correctly reasons his way to the conclusion that a lot of "witchcraft" accusations are just people acting out their prejudices against women who have done nothing worse than being poor and socially isolated.
good recommendation!
Please stop with the claim that this was some sort of feminism/patriarchy thing. In some places the victims were mainly women, in some places (most well known is Muscovy) they were mainly men.
The vast majority of people accused of witchcraft in England were also men IIRC. But, obviously feminists wanting to craft a narrative about suppression of women's power don't really care about those.
Well, the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_early_modern_period says about the victims that "roughly 80% were women" and cites a source for it.
Given that Kramer was clearly misogynistic, I don't think it absurd to suggest that such sentiments may have played a role. (Of course, it does not follow that witch hunts were simply powerful men hating women, case closed.)
I don't think that astrology counted as magic in the sixteenth century. It was considered legitimate by Galileo, Brahe, & Kepler.
Yeah, the line between magic and science gets really blurry the further back you go. Newton messed around with alchemy, for instance. A lot of times it's not clear how, with the knowledge they had at the time, they could know astrology and alchemy were false. I mean, the moon really does affect the tides, who's to say Mars doesn't influence war or Venus love, with a prescientific knowledge base?
If you're bored you can check out Agrippa's books of occult philosophy; the poor guy's trying to draw principles from items of information, but all his information's BS.
Augustine, in his "Confessions", sort of pauses the whole book midway through to go on a rant where he does a semi-scientific debunking of astrology ("I knew a guy who knew two kids born at the same second, yet one was a rich man's son and one a slave, and they had very different life outcomes. And even if you don't believe that story, what about twins who may have very different personalities and paths in life?").
This would have been written around the year 400 AD. He had some motivated reasoning (he wanted to discredit Manichaeans who were big on astrology), but the basic arguments against astrology were definitely available to people.
Yeh. The twin thing is a very telling rebuttal - fraternal twins should have the exact same lifestyle, outcomes and personalities.
Alchemy was just primitive chemistry. It had some crazy ideas but it was also mixing fluids a la chemistry.
I mean, I basically agree. Their theory was way off, but there was no way they could have known better, and they did document some reactions.
As well, consider that 21st century alchemy machines produce 10% of the world's electricity which is more valuable annually than the amount of gold mined worldwide
Nuclear reactors? But that's naturally occurring alchemy, right? The uranium's radioactive, it'll change into something else without you doing anything.
I do find it amusing that after centuries trying to turn lead into gold, we find that lots of things turn themselves into lead by themselves.
We did figure out how to turn lead into gold. It just takes a 600 MeV proton beam and the results are radioactive. And it costs more than the gold is worth by orders of magnitude. But we can do it!
ooo, that makes me happy.
> it’s by an slightly crazy 1920s Catholic priest
Montague Summers was never a Catholic priest. He was ordained as an Anglican deacon and later claimed to be a Catholic priest as part of a weird larp, but he was just an independent scholar and writer.
The Catholic Church holds that demons are real, demonic possession is real, and has rites of exorcism for the latter.
This is at best loosely related to the question of whether witchcraft was practiced in early modern Europe. Historical note: Prosecutions for witchcraft were more common and intense in Protestant countries (especially Germany, England, and Scotland) than in Catholic ones, although they took place in both.
The Vatican's chief exorcist (prior to his death a few years back, not sure who replaced him), Fr Gabriele Amorth, wrote some books branded as "from the Vatican's chief exorcist" on his experiences and beliefs in which he's fairly explicit that he believes in medieval-style witches exactly of the type described above. He also makes a big point of saying that most people who exorcists see are just mentally ill, and has some interesting Marian heresies.
Of course, as Scott slightly touches on, belief in "satanists" with very real witchy powers is extremely mainstream in right-wing American Protestantism, and there are people still imprisoned from the witch hunts of the 80s.
As I've pointed out, belief in witchcraft by its opponents is orthogonal to the question of whether there were practitioners of witchcraft in their own self-understanding.
In anything, in the context of the 15-16th century, one would expect these two things to *positively* correlate. It is precisely a widespread cultural belief in the reality of witchcraft that would lead some to practice it, some to oppose it.
Thank you.
aA feminist, whose name escapes me, once pointed out - if the witches had the power attributed to them they would have been co-opted into the late medieval system. There would have been schools of witchcraft. Men would have sought them out, or taken over witchcraft.
The personal trappings of the supposed witch; the cat, the broom, the pot are all symbols of a woman who needs both companionship and an animal to catch mice, likes to keep a clean house, and has to eat.
There’s something really sad about that. These are the bare necessities of the poor. Try and keep a clean house and the b*stards will get you, and make the symbols of your genteel poverty reason to kill you.
Sometimes the cruelty of the past is exaggerated, witch hunts boil my piss though.
There is a section in the Malleus on "archer wizards", witches (usually male in this case) who through a pact with the Devil get the power to shoot arrows very effectively. Kramer suggests that these people *have* been co-opted, and he is constantly complaining that princes keep them around to shoot their enemies and refuse to let him prosecute them.
I'm not sure what to make of this.
Sufficiently advanced longbowtry is indistiguishable from witchcraft, in the spirit of “To make a longbowman, start with his grandfather”
Precisely. See Lars Andersen, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67W4kONfL4Y
Oh shit, we need to start training our armies for WWIV now then.
It's unlikely that WWIII would actually set us back to pre-gunpowder; for starters, even in the worst-case scenario where most of the human population dies, then the remaining ammunition is sufficient for a longer time than it would be with our current population.
(Also, nuclear winter's unlikely to be bad enough to collapse society in, say, Brazil.)
Brazilian agriculture is intensely dependent on oil and fertiliser imports from thousands of miles away. Nuclear winter might not take away their rainfall but it would be a catastrophe from Brazilians in any number of other ways.
Fair point, although there'd still be the capacity to feed at least a large chunk of the current population. I guess there's still the possibility of technological/infrastructure loss at that point, though probably not quite that much of it.
Nuclear winter probably isn't real: https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Winter
It is real, it's just less bad than the alarmists want you to think. The key bit I think you might have missed is that the comment that started this didn't give a timeframe for WWIII; it's plausible that arsenals could inflate back to Cold War levels or higher in the next few decades if SALT/START fall apart (note that the PRC is not party to SALT/START and is currently trying for nuclear parity; if the PRC doesn't sign on to something similar then we straight-up are looking at another arms race).
At those kinds of numbers, with tens of thousands of nukes getting exchanged, essentially everyone (including Bean, with whom I largely agree) agrees that there'd be non-negligible climatic effects. Definitely not going to kill us all - I ran the numbers on that a while back - and probably not going to set us back pre-gunpowder, but "nuclear winter isn't real" is overstating the case.
Training our AIs for WW4.
What I make of it is that Robin Hood was clearly a witch, and that whole "frolicking in the greenwood" thing was totally a euphemism.
Oh, I have some vague recollection that 50s folklore/revival of 'witch' traditions held that Robin and his Merry Men were a coven, with Marion being the Queen.
For all the same reasons you put: outlaws, going out to the greenwood, etc.
Can't very likely have been the '50s since wicca barely existed then (Gardner started in '54 at Bricket Wood, IIRC), but that stuff definitely filtered into the alternative pop culture of America later. The 1991 Robin Hood adventure game Conquests of the Longbow involves Marian being a pagan priestess/witch, among other occult and pseudo-Celtic business.
I thought the connection to paganism started with the 1980s TV series Robin of Sherwood (also the origin of the "Robin had a Saracen friend" trope): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_of_Sherwood
While that series certainly made it a mainstream idea, it was much older.
Here's something from 1954 by Barbara Lowe about Robin and the various identifications that antiquarians and folklorists had attributed to him:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4521486
"A hundred and sixty years ago, when Ritson produced his then exhaustive treatise on Robin Hood such an enquiry as I am embarking upon could not have been conceived. Opinions might then have differed as to whether the outlaw had lived in the twelfth, thirteenth or fourteenth century, and whether he was a yeoman or an earl, but everyone was agreed that he was both historical and human. It was only when folklore was invented, and Grimm began analysing fairy tales, that first, Thomas Wright, and then others, claimed for Robin Hood a supernatural origin. He was proved, in turn, to be a Teutonic mythical sprite, a sun-god, Mithras, Woodicock, the Man in Green, the Hobby Horse, and finally they dying god popularised by Sir James Frazer.
It is two versions of this last interpretation of Robin Hood that I want to consider here: that Robin Hood is Grand Master of a coven of witches, and an incarnation of Cernunnus, the Horned God of the Old Stone Age; and that he is a spirit of vegetation, doomed to die periodically for the good of the crops.
…In sum – you may go to the Old Stone Age for Jolly Robin, or Robin Goodfellow – for covens of female witches prancing round a stag-man, or for a dying victim of the seasons. But you will not find Robin Hood. He belongs absolutely to the mediaeval world of the long bow, the guild fraternity, and the Catholic Church."
Richard Rahl in The Sword of Truth has this power, though he is initially unaware that it's magic. His magic is definitely hereditary, though.
Co-opt easily demonstratable male "witch" talent but not female I guess!
Considering that there was money and power to be had in giving women equal rights, I find it interesting that they were not "co-opted" by rulers i.e allowed to be maximally productive.
I think it's just really none obvious that social reality isn't physical reality, especially when its hard to find counterexamples.
Conspiracy theory I've heard for the rise of (second-wave) feminism was with the rise of labor-saving devices, it was now more economically efficient to have women working outside the home. And, a la Two-Income Trap, it drives down wages too, so now you need two incomes to get by.
Theoratically, if an household works twice the hours, they should be able to produce roughly twice the commodities they would otherwise. So save for the availablility of capital the net wages should be unaffected.
Right, but now you have two people working instead of one. So the market is able to capture more people's labor.
Powerful men have always used women's talents—typically through making them part of their families or using talented relatives.
Unequal rights for women has *always* been about maximizing their productivity, just not in cash wages, and in a way that violates bodily autonomy by contemporary sensibilities: women’s work has been to bear and raise children (who in turn work farms, tend animals, and care for other children).
I think not, i think, if anything, its been about maximizing the productivity that the *husband can capture*.
Though actually, i think it was mostly from the sincere belief that women were on average, much stupider than men in most things, which is, of course, absurd, but becomes self-fulfilling when everyone believes it, and is very hard to shake if its a religious belief. It may even be paired with the deontological moral belief that women *should* be subservient or confine themselves to a sphere that makes them, on average, more subservient.
All the other stuff where men profit from the labor of women reinforces this belief, but I don't think it began with that.
Though maybe there is more to it, because it seems so strange to me that it evolved, as far as I can tell, literally everywhere, which is one of the more vexing anthropological questions.
Like, if women are better on average social skills, and social skills lead to status, then what gives? Shouldn't they have grabbed power in the hunter-gatherer days?
My guess is it has to do with the differing aggression levels on average, with most aggressive guys becoming the rulers? Or maybe the schizophrenics, who are more likely to be men becoming shamans?
But that doesn't explain anything, because why would they single out women for discrimination?
It's a good observation.
Although there are lots of scary things that governments don't co-opt. Like, serial killers. Nobody wonders why the government doesn't recruit cadres of serial killers and unleash them on their enemies. It would be impossible.
Maybe the mental model was "witchcraft sometimes works but is too chaotic, unpredictable, and dangerous for a state to reliably use as a weapon."
It doesn't seem completely crazy to me that the CIA could occasionally put together a real-life "suicide squad" for black-ops stuff (minus the superpowers and internal bombs). Take some messed-up people who nobody will miss, turn them loose on designated targets in a place where nobody cares who gets hurt, and cross your fingers. Yes, the probability of success would be low (unless your operatives were more like Frank Abignail Jr. and less like Harley Quinn) but it seems like something an overconfident bureaucrat would try at least once.
It was not historically uncommon for governments to recruit convicts as an alternative to prison, and certain pirates have been pardoned and enlisted as well; lots of precedent and even some claims that it's happening in the current Russo-Ukrainian war.
Uhhh, not likey ? Giving unreliable and unstable individuals military training and access to military grade equipment and training and force your personal into close extended contact with them, ????, profit ? How can you force people like this to follow orders ? Why wouldn't they empty their machine guns into civilians for pleasure or even succeed at the objective but refuse to evacuate?
Successful uses of criminals by the state are usually examples like colonization and pirates. Both of these examples it weren't the "Serial Killer" type of criminals, more like the usual mix of opportunists and once-good mostly-still-good people that is the majority of criminals.
The CIA is crazy and evil beyond understanding, so I wouldn't say it's necessarily representative of other intelligence agencies (who are crazy and evil beyond understanding and shouldn't be representative of anything human) or other military-ish organizations.
Russia is using convicts to fight in Ukraine, today. I'd recommend the leaked footage of Prigozhin giving a recruiting pitch to a yard full of them, it's pretty wild. "We're very careful about taking perpetrators of sexual assualt... but we understand mistakes happen"
I didn't find the argument convincing but the book CHAOS which was published like a year ago basically argues that Manson was working for the CIA as a kind of asset to infiltrate into Hollywood high society and they gave him money and a bunch of drugs to keep him and his followers happy, but woops that didn't work out great never mind.
He doesn't argue explicitly for any particular theory, just lays out a case that the CIA and FBI were all up in Manson's business and either he was a direct asset or being manipulated to do their bidding and.. isn't that weird? I think the author probably believes they were either trying to actually spark Manson's race war or just generally discredit the hippie movement by making news
maybe sometimes, far more likely they use actual soldiers or police for none suicide missions.
I think one real-life example is South Korea put together a suicide squad to hypothetically assassinate Kim Jung il after he had tried to assassinate their PM. They trained a bunch of petty criminals in a very harsh special forces training environment that killed 20 percent of them. They were called Unit 684
Ultimately, they decided against going through with the assassination, but they kept the unit on the island, which was confined to the island, the unit figured they were going to die anyway, or were just being irrational and tried to assassinate their own PM instead. They got most of their training officers and their CO, were stopped in Seul, and killed themselves/survivors were executed.
I don't think it would be impossible for a government to recruit serial killers. I do think it would be a waste of time because governments already have people who are better at killing than serial killers are.
Not saying it's happened, but people have definitely alleged the CIA has actually done this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOtN3PllDrk
though, to be honest, they're "recruiting" pretty much anyone.
The Nazis did, but that was due to Nazis being evil and their enemies being large numbers of Polish civilians. The leader of that unit, Oskar Dirlewanger, was killed shortly after being captured in 1945 and the Allied leadership didn't care and quietly covered it up.
Yeah. It's be as stupid as e.g. the west trying to co-opt mujahideen onto their side of the cold war. No government would be naive enough to say they're the enemy of my enemy and support them despite the many obvious ways in which that could go wrong.
Governments do hire soldiers to kill a bunch of people. I don't think they're generally the type of person to become a serial killer unprompted, but that's why they don't need to co-opt it. They can get a regular person to kill.
I'm not sure if he was a feminist but Mark Twain made this point. If a witch could have made storms the King of England would have bribed them to make storms any time there was an invasion. He included it in The Prince and the Pauper.
>If a witch could have made storms the King of England would have bribed them to make storms any time there was an invasion. He included it in The Prince and the Pauper.
Oh interesting. The witches in Fort Salem specialize in tornadoes and were used to defeat the British in the Revolutionary war, I wonder if that premise was inspired by Mark Twain.
Are you telling me there's a show that did "Royal Navy getting wrecked by magical waterspouts" as the departure point for an alt history show?
Not specifically that, but I think there is a version of George Washington crossing the Delaware with witches behind him cranking out tornadoes.
It's not a show I can recommend generally. Very much guilty pleasure territory. It's also extremely 'young adult' with burning teenage romantic angst, so much it is likely not tolerable my many adults. But I have a strong capability to enjoy media of almost any quality as long as I find some aspect of it interesting, and I appreciate that they at least aimed high in their worldbuilding here.
I can recommend both the book and TV series of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - though it's Britain co-opting magic to defeat the French in the Napoleonic Wars (and that's only a subplot).
The book is one of my favorites! The TV show was fine, but fairly forgettable, IMO.
Yeah, that does seem too good to pass up. (I kinda have the same problem with the X-Men universe- there's no way people like Storm or Jean Grey are not going to be at the centre of a frantic bidding war between governments.)
Though Mark Twain didn't make this point the House of Plantagenet sometimes claimed to be descended from demons. So it's not as if it'd have been a hard bar to power anyway.
Also, yeah, any world with supers should work extremely differently from our own. Technology should be less advanced, militaries should be more even and more about super units, etc.
Then again, we have Saul visiting the Witch of Endor, so that is an attempt by the king to use witchcraft to get an advantage.
And since it's in the Bible, people would have used it as evidence that witchcraft was real. The witch *does* call up the ghost of Samuel.
To be fair, I heard Samuel just added that in because he wanted to make more money selling Ewok toys.
More seriously you'd expect this to be ongoing in a court mage style arrangement though.
There's a legend that witches raised the storm that saved Britain from the Spanish Armada.
I hadn't heard that. Do you have a source I can read more? It certainly didn't show up in Elizabethan propaganda. But that doesn't mean it wasn't around.
You might be amused that William the Conqueror is recorded as having hired a witch to hurl spells at his enemies during a siege.
>A feminist, whose name escapes me, once pointed out - if the witches had the power attributed to them they would have been co-opted into the late medieval system. There would have been schools of witchcraft. Men would have sought them out, or taken over witchcraft.
You've basically described the premise of the low budget Hulu TV show "Fort Salem". It's a young adult military academy drama set in an alternative universe where the Witches of Salem reveal themselves and then ally with the USA against the British during the Revolutionary War and have remained a branch of the US military ever since.
Opening credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTRLhNdmLPw
Show trailer that explains some of this alternative history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3y3-aWM0RQ
This is also the premise (sort of) of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, which is a pretty fun book involving British wizards working for the Crown against Napoleon.
I think this underestimate the fact that people really believed their religion. Maybe getting a witch as an ally is a good way to get a military advantage over your neighbouring lords. But if it means getting on the wrong side of God the utility calculation becomes quite clear.
(Besides people also really believed in witchcraft which for the purpose of leveraging witch power into actual power is basically the same thing as having actual witch power).
Agree on the cruelty obviously...
>We prohibit under anathema that murderous art of crossbowmen and archers, which is hateful to God, to be employed against Christians and Catholics from now on.
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum10.htm
It had stopped no one, so if witchcraft was as obvious as crossbow bolt...
Crossbowmen and archers weren't literally conspiring with the devil.
The problem is that all it takes is one guy in the royal family to hire someone to shoot everyone ahead of him in line for the throne with magic arrows, and then the generals of opposing armies. Also, apparently he was saying that archer wizards were a common thing, so the question is how there were any stable governments instead of them all being shot by magic arrows. I guess they all know what words to use to avoid getting shot? And all their generals? But all of them keep it secret from the general populace just to make it a little more likely that they can can use it on some new enemy?
There does seem to be an implicit assumption that there are nice witches you can go and talk to (and a linked category of perfectly ok wise women). The problem with books like the Malleus is it’s a product of an unusually educated/theologically astute clerical subculture. The peasants may just have believed old women had magical powers, and some of them were evil.
Frankly, the “witches” themselves may have gone along with this, so they could sell magic to make a living and deter people from attacking/exploiting them. Much of this is during the wars of religion, so there’d be lots of widows and spinsters and a fairly unreliable legal system for commoners. There are also, as Scott points out, psychological/coping reasons why traumatised people at the bottom of society might want to believe they have magical revenge powers.
Or unpopular teenage girls in high school, as now...
Yeah, I definitely get the sense that there were a lot of people (mostly old women) practising what we'd probably now call Traditional European Medicine.
> if the witches had the power attributed to them they would have been co-opted into the late medieval system. There would have been schools of witchcraft. Men would have sought them out, or taken over witchcraft
That seems a bit sexist. If witches had the power attributed to them then they probably would have just taken over the kingdoms for themselves.
(Which, I suppose, is a good reason not to attempt to co-opt them, if you're the existing power structure.)
It wasn’t sexist, it was feminist
I wonder what happens when someone who thinks their penis was stolen tries to pee?
About half the population pees without one.
That's irrelevant to what Andrew is wondering, though ;)
Half the population generally doesn't imagine they previously had a penis they used for that purpose, and now only have "nothing but [their] smooth body" in its place.
They were built for that from the start.
Good post.
Modern spirituality tends to be vague ("we see through a glass darkly") so it's often forgotten how scholarly and precise the medievals were in classifying the supernatural world. There's a whole genre of demonology literature breaking down all the ranks and orders of spirits ("Furies", who sow mischief, "maligenii", who tempt and ensare, and so on).
At times it has the air of a really complex DnD setting. Not by accident, really - Gygax et al drew heavily on those sources when creating fictional monsters like cacodemons and so on. "Demonic possession" would have sounded very vague in the middle ages. Almost like a modern person saying "I have a virus".
I suppose there's a psychological pull toward the idea that theories are intrinsically good, and the more detailed they are, the better. "Once our grimoires classified 600 spirits. Now they classify 700! Our understanding of the world is advancing!"
>"Demonic possession" would have sounded very vague in the middle ages. Almost like a modern person saying "I have a virus".
I like to think that one of the reasons complex supernatural/spiritual classification schemes have fallen out of favor is that they used to provide a useful framework to deal with all kinds of questions, but that this function has been mostly taken over by modern psychology, meteorology and others.
If you look in places like Tibetan Buddhism, elaborate and very systematic descriptions of the astral planes and things like that (including demons) are still very much in use today.
You don't even really need to go that far. Try conspiracy theory TikTok or QANON subs.
"Somewhere out there, there still lurk pitfalls in our common-sensical and well-intentioned thought processes, maybe just as dark and dangerous as the ones that made Henry Kramer devote his life to eradicating a scourge that didn’t exist."
Yes, and this vindicates all of my ideas and beliefs specifically.
Also I'm glad this isn't 2007 or half the comments would be jokes about witches being made of wood and so forth.
I like Monty Python, but by God, their fandom ruined the internet for a solid 10-15 years.
I apologize, we were young.
One of the very first xkcd cartoon was about how Monty Python became known for surreal, iconoclast, original humour and then were quoted to death in the most boring and unoriginal way.
https://xkcd.com/16/
Sadly, though the situation with Monty Python references has really improved over the past 10 years, xkcd has offset that by getting worse.
Yeah definitely.
This only really applies to Holy Grail, which has the most of the spontaneous absurdism. I don't see how it applies to their sketches like Four Yorkshiremen or The Accountant, or most of the bits from Life of Brian, unless you extend it to meaning "everything is only ever funny the first time".
There's a lot of spontaneous absurdism in the TV show, much less so in the movies which (largely) feel the need to keep to a plot.
Scott, a couple times in times in this post, you pretty glibly assert that witches didn't exist. I wonder why you think you know that?
We need to separate two orthogonal questions:
1) Whether there were people who, in their own self-understanding, were "practicing witchcraft;"
2) Whether "practicing witchcraft" had any real supernatural power.
Let's just stipulate for the sake of discussion that the answer to 2 is "absolutely not." It doesn't follow that the answer to 1 couldn't still be "yes."
In particular, if the prevailing beliefs of the culture were such that plenty of people believed in the Malleus Maleficarum (and so be motivated to investigate witchcraft), then why couldn't those prevailing beliefs also be such that at least some small number of people would, you know, try to practice witchcraft (in sense 1, not 2)?
We have people in our population who engage in all manner of weird crimes for selfish/weird reasons. Why isn't it a perfectly good theory that some small percentage of the population in the 1500's engaged in witchcraft? One needn't posit that they were well-described by the Malleus Maleficarum. (There were a fair number of American Communists in the 1930's, but they are not necessarily well-described in anti-communist writing.)
There may be witches? Like r/WitchesVsPatriarchy ?
No, not like that.
Scott never asserts that there were no witches in the sense of 1; in fact he specifically says that there may well have been - ctrl-F "And I don't want to completely rule out".
Ah, you're right! I read too quickly and somehow missed that paragraph. My bad!
But ... I'm still not sure that paragraph does full justice to my point. Scott closes the post with a reference to the beliefs that made "Henry Kramer devote his life to eradicating a scourge that didn’t exist." I'm saying that it's possible that the scourge really did exist (in sense 1), however differently from Kramer we would interpret that phenomenon.
Another analogy: in Russia in 1916, only a tiny percentage of the population were Bolsheviks, but none of us would say that the Bolsheviks "didn't exist." And this statement is completely orthogonal to how well we would take the beliefs of the Bolsheviks to map onto reality.
One problem here (for me at least) is that the witchcraft claims follow almost to a tee blood libel claims. And as a practicing Jew, I can confirm that we don’t drink the blood of Christian children, and that’s like, never been a thing. Therefore, it stands to reason (among many other reasons) that witchcraft has also never been a thing, and I can say that with a very high degree of confidence.
I don't see how that follows at all. Seems like very weak reasoning by analogy.
The following two things can be true:
1) False accusations were made against Jews due to ethno-religious hostility;
2) People (nominally Christian) engaged in a variety of folk practices, some derived from older pagan culture, some re-conceptualized in (inverse) Christian terms, which were met by intense hostility from the dominant Christian culture, and to which false accusations were added.
Far from contradicting each other, those two things seem highly compatible.
If I'm reading this dispute correctly, it looks like you need to unpack "practicing witchcraft" in your original point #1.
It's possible for a person to self-report "practicing witchcraft" in the sense of "I grow medicinal plants, make extractions of them, put them in cauldrons to try to craft tinctures that help people when they feel sick. And also, I fly around on a broomstick occasionally", and an accuser to report them as "practicing witcraft" in the sense of "you kill people with poisons and curses and also wither the towns' livestock and have sex with demons".
If you conflate these two definitions of "practicing witchcraft" without clarifying that each person actually means something completely different, you don't get the result you'd expect by just thinking about it as an atomic descriptor.
But a lot of it was not "I try to make tinctures to help people when they feel sick". There are plenty of superstitions and charms and spells to do harm to people, even if you're not a witch but you live in a peasant community that believes in these kinds of things.
Human nature being what it is, some people probably did want to cause harm to others, be that murder for gain, or revenge on enemies, or just "I hate everyone and I want to get back at them". So they would have tried spells and charms and potions and deals with the Devil.
Sometimes Goody Proctor really did make your cattle sick, because she was an enemy of yours. Whether she did it by dosing them with potions (our naturalistic explanation) or because she thought that the spell used to make the potions (witchcraft explanation) was the efficient cause doesn't make a difference to the motive: she was acting out of bad intentions to deliberately cause harm.
Not everybody, of course. But also not everybody accused was likely to have been innocent of no more than "dabbling in healing tinctures".
I take it for granted that "witchcraft" (in my OP sense 1) covers a variety of beliefs and practices, some benign, some not so benign. I don't treat it as an atomic descriptor.
That said, I don't think we need a detailed mapping to make sense of the notion that some people were indeed "practicing witchcraft," both as a self-understanding and as an accurate external description.
In my own view, one would have to go beyond naturalistic herbal medicine to qualify. There would need to some appeal to non-naturalistic beliefs and/or intent to harm. (Maleficium, after all, literally means "wrong doing.")
> And as a practicing Jew, I can confirm that we don’t drink the blood of Christian children, and that’s like, never been a thing.
I can see how being a practicing Jew would lend you some authority on what Jews are currently doing. I don't see how it's relevant to whether you can confirm that that's never been a thing.
Ariel Toaff is a practising Jew, son of the Chief Rabbi of Rome Elio Toaff who hosted Pope John Paul II on his first visit to a synogogue. Himself a rabbi, Ariel Toaff is also a professor of Medieval and Renaissance History.
His historical research suggested that it might have been a thing at some point, at least in a particular geographical location.
"Toaff's analysis, which is focused on the Trent trials, depends on two main theses. The first concerns the value of the confessions made under torture. In Toaff's view, the statements made by the accused can be believed when they concern details of ritual practices that the judges could not possibly be familiar with. Toaff's second argument relies on the concordance of the confessions. The fact that a number of confessions are identical is proof, according to Toaff, of their undoubted veracity.
The reaction of most historians was extremely critical. Among the criticisms made, three problems were especially important. The first concerns the use made of sources. Inquisitorial proceedings, which depended on confessions extracted by torture, do not allow historians to observe the “voices” of the accused. Further, the fact that dozens, perhaps hundreds of accounts of ritual murder resemble each other does not prove, in and of itself, that such killings actually occurred. This may in fact prove that the confessions were false (the accused told whatever the judges wanted them to say). Toaff has taken over, uncritically, the partisan notion formulated by the bishop of Trent (whose views caused a good deal of perplexity in Rome at the time), who ignored all the evidence against the notion of ritual murder, including all the papal bulls and all the imperial and royal decrees that were issued between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries in unequivocal rejection of the blood libel.
Toaff relied imprudently on the testimony of Jewish converts and on hagiographical narratives such as those of Bonelli (1747) and Divina (1902), written obviously in support of Simonino's elevation to sainthood. Using hagiographical sources without taking precautions raises a fundamental question: is it possible to study the question of ritual murder accusations narrowly, in isolation, without analyzing the cultural context and, above all, without reconstructing the long development of stereotypes of Jewish difference in Christian theology?According to some historians, Toaff did not merely misinterpret but actually manipulated his sources in his effort to distinguish between Ashkenazi Jewry (violent and “fundamentalist”) and Italian Jewry (civilized and tolerant).
A second problem with Toaff's approach has to do with the mythic dimension of the blood libel. Toaff confuses the myth with the ritual. Worse, he is in the grip of the myth. He keeps thinking from within the myth. Is it possible to approach the question of ritual murder or that of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion logically, factually? “Both have been exposed as false again and again. This has not kept millions of people, in Russia and now mostly in the Arab world, from swearing that they are true and that they provide an explanation of the world's history.”In the way of myths of power, the blood libel acts almost magically: it depends on realism while at the same time removing itself from the logic of proof. This is why the publishing house of Bollati-Boringhieri decided to reprint F. Jesi's L’accusa del sangue, a book that highlights the importance of the mechanisms that produce myths and assure their reception.
Finally, there is the nature of Toaff's narrative. He moves from one source to another, in a cavalier fashion, “going back to the Trent trial and moving on to the events in Norwich, to an iconographic study of sixteenth-century haggadoth and to the rituals associated with the Seder, to end with the sad and grotesque adventure of a German Jew, a painter of miniatures, implicated by pure chance in the events at Trent.” Toaff's style is lively, reminiscent of tabloid sensationalism. Readers may find themselves agreeing with the accusers as the author goes out of his way to address himself to “a public accustomed to screen violence in the movies. … Readers of Toaff's story encounter colorful protagonists whose psychology is simple: ‘Jewish adventurers engaged in illegal dealings,’‘a clever physician from Candia,’‘a strange young painter,’ a German rabbi who performs circumcisions (the Cutter!), ‘Jewish children handed over to the dangerous blade of his knife.’ And, why not, cannibalism, leprosy, suicide, buckets of blood.” Toaff erases the distinction between true and false. “This book is a tragedy. It is filled with half truths, a mixture of testimonies and points of view that are not believable. The way in which this book is written encourages the non specialist reader to reach conclusions of a very serious nature.”
This communiqué, which takes an ahistorical approach to the traditions of Judaism (“There has never existed…”), was followed by a statement coming from Ariel Toaff's father (“I am not at all in agreement with him, rather I oppose him”...
Now his position was: “My statement was an ironical academic provocation, designed to begin the process of breaking the taboo that surrounds research into the antichristian atmosphere within certain Ashkenazi European communities in the Middle Ages.”"
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1540-5923.2008.00257.x
In particular, I can totally imagine someone who, under the sway of some kind of anti-semitic theories, decides that if drinking blood of children is the source of power of those evil people, then maybe I should try it too and "become one of them", without realizing it made them totally different.
Well, now it's Bill Gates and the Clintons eating adrenal glands...QAnon has a lot of similarities.
You can confirm Jews exist though. The analogue here is the old idea of witches as a kind of big underground cult that didn’t have supernatural powers but believed they did.
Although I think there's a potentially interesting question of whether there might have occasionally been some underground cults that tried to imitate what they thought Jews were and engaged in some of the horrific practices that were attributed to them at the time.
I don't know that you'd even need that explicit a Jewish angle. The Crime of Gador in Spain (link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_Gádor) happened at a time when Spain was basically devoid of Jews, and speaks to at least some European populations engaging in ritual child murder.
More to the point (when it comes to blood libel), there are probably under 100 purported victims across Europe and the Middle East, between the 12th and 20th Centuries. I've no idea what the number of ritual child murders per capita per annum is, but you do a low-ball fermi estimate, taking population of the relevant area at any given time as 100,000,000 (well below the real figure), then to get one ritual child murder every eight years you'd need a PCPA figure of 1/800,000,000 (which would equate to about one every three years in the modern US - I've no idea if this is right, but the US has about 1,500 child murders every year so it sounds plausible that 0.067% would at least meet the bar of "deeply fucked up murders by a stranger").
I think the numbers wouldn't add up to say that all or most of the blood libel cases were ritual murders by Jews, without Jews being more likely to commit them than gentiles (you'd need a substantially higher rate of ritual child murders than looks plausible). I think you can explain the rest of it with the idea setting in after William of Norwich, then becoming people's default theory of who's responsible when you find a weirdly murdered child in an era before forensics. I'd love to know if instances of blood libel went down once belief in witchcraft became acceptable among elites in the 16th Century to get an insight into this point.
Thing is, there's a lot of stuff that peasant and folk communities do that straddles the line between superstition and witchcraft.
You have a falling out with a neighbour and want to cause them harm?
You can bury eggs on their land, which will cause their crops to fail and their cattle won't thrive on the grazing.
You can cause their cows to abort by throwing the afterbirth of an aborted calf onto their land.
Two examples from country folklore of my own region.
So everyone believed in magic because everyone was pretty much using little spells themselves, be that charms, prayers, think of things like "bury a statue of St Joseph in your yard to ensure you sell your house" and the like. Then you had people like wise women and cunning men, who knew cures and spells and you consulted them if you needed help. Having the knowledge to do good meant they also had the knowledge to do harm (if you know how to cure poisoning, you also know what plants are poisonous).
So then take that a step further. You have a quarrel with a neighbour, or bad things start happening. What is causing that? When the usual causes are dismissed, then you start looking for unusual causes - like magic.
And maybe you suspect that woman who goes about telling people if they displease her, she will curse them - like Alice Kyteler, or Kepler's mother:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Kyteler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharina_Kepler
Is there any evidence of an actual alternate religion being practiced, though? We have cases where the Church tried to persecute actual heresies like the Cathars. There's the theory going around it was a survival of pre-Christian European folk religion, but I'm not sure how strong the evidence for that is.
I don't think there is evidence of "an actual alternate religion," but I also don't think that's what witchcraft was. I described it above as something much looser, "people (nominally Christian) engaged in a variety of folk practices, some derived from older pagan culture, some re-conceptualized in (inverse) Christian terms."
From my understanding, one of the goals of the inquisition was to catch people who had non-Christian beliefs while they pretended to be Christians (mostly to avoid being killed or get kicked out of the country, I guess). Not because they believed their rituals effective, just out of general principle.
In the mindset of an organization happy to root out Jews and Muslims, going after people who believe they can influence the world by supernatural means contrary to Church doctrine seems like a no-brainer.
Of course, in my model of the medieval world, basically everyone used superstitious practices not grounded in church doctrine. Burning every peasant who nailed a horseshoe to their home would probably not have been feasible. But trying to root out at least the above average practitioners of heathen rituals would basically on the to-do list of every religious organization bent on enforcing 100% believers.
The belief that witchcraft is effective was probably just something that "everybody knows". I guess that the bible is at least ambivalent on the effectiveness. I mean, Exodus 22:18 does not command you to make fun of witches for their beliefs that they can influence the Divine Creation with the help of rituals which obviously don't work, it just tells you to kill them. (Per Wikipedia, the medieval church doctrine denied witchcraft, but in the early modern period, but became at least more ambivalent in the early modern era. A 'small ice age' leading to worse agricultural outcomes may have played a role?)
I think that all societies have had some people trying to cast spells to harm others. Probably happened in 1000 BCE, 1000 CE, 1500 CE and 2000 CE. This does not explain why the church was mostly chill about it in 1300 CE, but started persecuting it much more harshly towards 1600 CE. Or why witch-hunts became so popular in this period.
This paragraph quoted from the malleus maleficarum "[the devil] assumed body of a man, and urges them to keep faith with him, promising them worldly prosperity and length of life; and they recommend a novice to his acceptance... and when the disciple asks what more must be done, the devil demands the following oath of homage to himself: that she give herself to him, body and soul, for ever..."
this sounds like a version of something that does happen today in spiritual communities and cults and made me wonder about the possibility of a man (or whoever, but it says man here) claiming to be a devil to attract followers and power, and most especially young women who will do anything you tell them to.
I assume cult dynamics are widely applicable. I haven't studied the Malleus Maleficarum enough to judge how much of its detail might be descriptively accurate, but it's at least possible that, yes, that's what some cult leaders said.
There is one documented case of a Satanist cult killing a bunch of people to fuel their rituals - Adolfo Constanzo's gang in 1980s Mexico. However, they were
- a pre-existing criminal gang
- following a unique brand of nonsense invented by Constanzo, not any sort of pre-existing tradition
- fairly rapidly caught, with absolutely tons of physical evidence, as soon as they targeted a civilian
We can compare this to the similarly well documented false accusations of random innocents during the Satanic Panic around the same time. Medieval witch trials pretty much invariably resemble the second type - people, frequently under duress, frequently small children, making wild physically-impossible claims under prompting from authority focus with zero physical evidence to support any aspect of them.
It's not true that the trial records invariable contain unrealistic material. But even it were, it's perfectly possible that the unrealistic material was added as "piling on." That would not preclude the possibility that some were engaged in practices that both they and their opponents understood as witchcraft.
For example, there's plenty of literary evidence that practices of cursing were common in antiquity. Is it likely that all such things just suddenly stopped in the early Middle Ages?
Invoking the example of various panics tells us very little. This is a mistaken form of reasoning. Henry Kissinger once said, "Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you." Likewise, the presence of false allegations is not evidence that there are no true allegations.
"This is how I think of myself too."
Bravo! And so should we all say.
I think I still have a copy of the Malleus around here somewhere, but you clearly got a lot further in reading it than I ever have.
Just to bring up the alternate hypothesis: magic exists; malicious magic directed to harm others exists; and spirits that desire to entrap people into using same, to their ultimate detriment, exist.
(None of which is to say that Kramer had either a complete, or a wholly true, idea of how all this worked.)
To the obvious rejoinder about provability, I will note that there's no reason why a malicious spirit that is directly granting supernatural powers to someone should *want* to make its existence and its methods clearly understandable to large numbers of humans. And such a spirit would not be bound by the "single simple rule that applies in all times and all places" principle that the scientific method presupposes.
But if witches can perfectly avoid detection, it would be pointless writing a book about how to find them.
I suspect that conditions in the 1500s were pretty different from today.
(For that matter, the wide distribution of texts like Malleus Maleficarum may have been one of the factors motivating the change.)
Note that a malicious spirit *also* wants to be malicious to those that it has given power to. Because, in the end, it wants to tear *everyone* down. That is, it's using people. So it wouldn't want witches that can perfectly avoid detection as well. In fact, it's playing both sides, both the ones accusing people of being witches AND the people actually making pacts. Because both serve its purpose of causing strife and murder and malice.
"there's no reason why a malicious spirit...should *want* to make ...its methods clearly understandable"
There was a fantasy book I read ages ago (the title escapes me) that had sorcerers controlling demons to do malevolence. [possible spoiler ahead] It was thought that every veteran summoner eventually got careless with complex runes but the last scene was an, er, boss demon explaining that it was all a deception - an excuse to cause wanton destruction and then surprise the 'controller' at the height of his career!
So maybe that..
A spirit must be bound by *some* limitations, unless you want to argue that it's literally omnipotent. The lack of cooperation makes it harder to discover those rules, but not impossible, given enough effort and opportunities.
You could think of it like learning about the enemy's weapons in war - sure, the enemy isn't going to *tell* you a single simple rule like "To blow up our tanks, just hit the top armor with a Javelin missile," but those rules derive from deeper physical laws like "steel armor is heavy and a tank can't carry too much of it on top." Your enemies aren't omnipotent, so you can learn about those deeper laws, and come up with ways to test your hypotheses even if they don't cooperate - "Since the top armor of a tank is thinner, let's make a missile that hits from the top."
Likewise, unless evil spirits are omnipotent and merely feigning weakness to toy with us, there must be some laws about what they can and can't do - when they can and can't lay curses, when they can or can't be bound and exorcised - and one would expect that over hundreds of years of trial and error that witches and witch hunters would have developed some testable hypotheses.
Yeah, there are some limitations.
They are, however, entirely capable of just not doing anything clearly supernatural in any provable context, such that systematic investigators mostly come to the conclusion that witches don't exist. This conclusion is of course convenient for the spirits in question.
It's also inconvenient, because they can't take any actions that might reveal themselves, and they get more and more restricted as things like cell phone cameras become ubiquitous. They're basically backing themselves into a "god of the gaps" situation.
This would also be vulnerable to covert observation - if the spirit isn't omniscient, then it doesn't *know* if it's leaving provable evidence of the supernatural or not, because it doesn't know what we know. You could, say, put a few hidden cameras in a witch's house to catch a spirit manifesting in front of her when it thinks she's alone.
(That would be a neat fantasy novel scenario - witch hunters never actually caught any witches or banished any spirits, but they investigated so thoroughly that the spirits don't dare affect the real world just in case they get caught.)
There are quite a few steps between "omniscient" and "capable of being caught out by trivial human measures such as hidden cameras".
Also, there's plenty of measures available that wouldn't trip the "obviously supernatural" flag, especially given modern civilization's immovable ideological prior against anything supernatural existing. If it's a one-off event, a spirit could do almost anything, and get caught on camera, and the reaction of everyone not directly involved will still be "meh, probably nothing".
Concrete example: suppose there is an actual witch, who does like Kramer says they often do, and buries a charm under someone's doorstep to inflict debilitating magic illness. How does the modern world react? Random, mysterious nasty illness is downright routine and would get dismissed; even if the charm is removed and the illness vanishes, that is also routine and would get dismissed; and you could have the witch confess on camera and film the whole process, and it would just vanish into the noise online. Just as Scott supposes that the medieval world would generate lots of reports of witches even if witches didn't exist, it seems clear that the modern world would ignore all reports of witches, even if they did.
My speculation about evil spirits would include, as you say, *some* limitations. There would have to be some laws/restraint keeping them from wrecking the place completely. Are these laws knowable and usable by humans? Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy(1945) thought so(search "occult"). Is it ever a good idea to experiment with poorly understood powerful forces that have some sort of consciousness and are characterized by deception and malevolence? It's like toying with atomic power except the atoms don't like you.
There's an interesting contrast with "Cautio Criminalis", written in 1631 by Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld. Like Kramer, Spee affirms that witches exist and that their crime is the worst possible. However, he argues that almost all accusations are false and the trials are a farce. I'd love to read a review of this work, as a counterpart to "Malleus Maleficarum".
As a sample, here is Question XV: Who in particular are the people who continually incite the rulers against witches?
Spee identifies four groups. First, theologians and prelates who are detached from the real world, "happy in their own speculations and little museums". Some of them are so inexperienced in the affairs of men that they can fall prey to misinformation they read or they can regard the courts as sacrosanct and incapable of error. Trusting the judgement of the courts, they inevitably conclude that "everything is full of witches" and "this plague must be crushed". Second, the lawyers who have gradually noticed that witch trials are lucrative and as a result have suddenly become very pious. Third, the "ignorant and usually jealous and malicious common folk" who "avenge their feuds through defamation" and also accuse the authorities of witchcraft if those authorities don't seize and torture the targets of their defamation. Fourth, people who try to avoid suspicion by making accusations, perhaps because they themselves are witches. Spee notes that the set of denunciations often cycles back round to the first accuser (who then confesses) and so either innocent people are confessing, or making an accusation should be treated as highly suspicious.
A good job none of these four groups has any contemporary analog!
Hooray! I came to drop the cautio criminalis comment and I see I have been beaten to the punch!! My understanding is that Spee’s book was more highly regarded among practicing witch hunter, a witchhunters witchhunter if you will, and MM was seen as somewhat sensational, in part because of the penis-stealing focus.
You are more likely to be struck by lightning or hit by a comet, than to be falsely accused of witchcraft.
People who spend too much time publicly worrying about false accusations of witchcraft probably have an agenda. I would not be surprised to find that most of them already made their own contracts with the Devil.
That's perfect. But also very much the sort of thing a witch would say.
Us people-tings be always in a panic. Satanic Panic, Commie Panic, Climate Panic ...
Arthur Miller compared the Red Scare to the witch trials, but he didn't believe witches existed, whereas there really were agents of the Soviet Union operating in the US (and of course the Second World of communist governments itself existed in a way that Satan didn't).
Yeah, the Crucible is a great play if read literally as being about the Salem Witch Trials and human nature but is just garbage as a parable for HUAC and the Army-McCarthy hearings since Communists are real and witches aren't.
Didn't McCarthy have something like a 10% rate of the people he accused of being Commies actually being Commies? There were certainly a bunch of Soviet agents, but McCarthy in particular wasn't doing much better than chance.
Well, if 1% of all people that could feasibly have been put under investigation were actual Commies, then he did ten times better than chance :)
I've seen a credible claim, but I forget where so the credibility is obviously noncommutative, that *every* person accused by McCarthy of witchcraft, I mean Communism, on every version of his list, was in fact a Soviet agent.
There are some that we know were definitely Soviet agents (due to Venona decrypts mentioning them), some that we're pretty sure were *not* Soviet agents (due to, again, Venona decrypts mentioning them) and a lot that AFAIK we've got no particular evidence on.
You could argue, I suppose, that a lot of the people we don't have evidence on could have been undetected Commies, but literal 100% either way doesn't make sense.
There were a lot of Soviet agents in the US (and British) governments in that era, but we later learned who most of them were. McCarthy, IIRC, did slightly better than chance in identifying Soviet agents, and the cases where it quickly became clear he was just making stuff up, discredited the hard work other people were doing to identify Soviet agents in the US government and even the idea that there *were* any significant number of such.
I don't think McCarthy was actually a Soviet agent himself, but a clever spymaster would probably want to have someone like him doing that sort of work on the other side.
The play "The Crucible" does include a character that actually is a witch, in the sense that she attempts to perform a magic ritual; her getting caught is one of the things that starts the search for other witches, of which there were none.
Would it be a better fit for the current "Nazis everywhere" panic?
This is Scott at his best; this is as good as any classic SSC article
Agree, both in comment and in name
> Did you know you can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum? You can go into a bookstore and say “I would like the legendary manual of witch-hunters everywhere, the one that’s a plot device in dozens of tired fantasy novels”. They will sell it to you and you can read it.
Oh yes. Further, they wrote less books back then so it's easier to get an overview.
> Witches are worse than Jews, because Jews never claimed to be Christian. But witches were once Christian and then renounced the faith.
This is a fairly common argument. One Christian theologian, for example, argued that non-Christians from non-Christian countries should not be discriminated against while heretics should be. Likewise people who had immigrated or conquered were not supposed to be blamed for their faith in the same way as local converts. Islam actually codifies this: heretics or apostates go to hell while people who are simply not Muslim might still be righteous (though not as righteous as if they were Muslims). And Jewish apostates are poorly thought of while gentiles can be moral so long as they follow certain rules.
> Theory 1, Kramer made everything up. I don’t want to completely discount this. [...] Theory 2, Kramer is faithfully reporting a weird mass hallucination that had been going on long before he entered the picture.
Theory 3: Humans inherently make sense of the world by creating metaphysical phenomenon that have are meta-explanations with loose grounding in material reality and if you focus on these phenomenon, rather than the material reality underlying them, you will end up with coherent but false worldviews. Our ability to manifest these metaphysical phemomenon both allows us to organize beyond our social groups and is a function, perhaps a necessary one, of our ability to theorize and pattern match. Kramer had a series of true phenomenon such as cow murders and pattern matched them to a metaphysical theory about magic.
The idea that he was either lying or dealing with liars ignores there may have been a reality, even if a misunderstood one.
Yeah, it seems more and more like humans have this reflex to blame bad things on malicious people or malevolent abstract entities (or the victims themselves), when the actual causes are complex interactions involving many people, many of whom can be completely unaware.
"Moloch" in retrospect seems like a playful attempt to posit an abstract entity responsible for a class of problems that many people didn't even notice was a class.
Witches did most certainly exist in the time of the Malleus Maleficarum.
Of course they did not have the magical powers that have been attributed to them. But they had social power and power to frighten. Think of them like the Voodoos in Africa. They can have real effect on peoples lives due to those people believing the curses are real. So they manifest the negative on themselves. Same with witches.
Even now we have decent sized groups of Wiccans. Most who practice harmless rituals. But some who use social pressures and effects to mess with their enemies or modify society. Are they a serious threat? Hmm probably not. But they do exist.
Did you respond to the wrong post with this?
Or have you used our discussion about Wiccans and Witches as an odd segue to discuss AI?
Not really sure how this is relevant to the subject at hand?
I am pretty new to ACX - only been a month or so. Not sure what you mean by every post is one step away from AI x-risk? That makes no sense. If the story is about AI then fair enough. But this one had zero to do with AI in any way. So I thought it was an odd step for the commenter to take to try to change the discussion.
Okay....
Pretty odd connection though. Because an actual sentient AI that takes control of the world will not be playing into the hands of any human. So it does not seem rational for the creators of it to be building it because they think it will give them control over people and society. It will not. They will be controlled by the AI just like the people they may have sought to control.
So I really think it is a step too far and not really relevant to this conversation - which I am well in my right to question if someone goes of track.
Yep that certainly fits what I know about Wiccan.
Unfortunately there are bad eggs in the group though. I think they are only a tiny minority though.
That's basically the whole story of Joan of Arc - except it was useful for the French political power to rehabilitate her in the end.
This was a plotline over a couple of episodes of Star Trek: Voyager (bad show, but I liked these episodes).
Someone sets up a holodeck program simulating a medieval Irish village. It is left running on a permanent basis, and the omnipresent background mischief of space causes it to start going wrong. The programming safeguards -- that normally prevent the simulated villagers from noticing anything that wouldn't fit their reality -- fail. And there's quite a lot of stuff going on that doesn't fit the normal functioning of a medieval Irish village, so the villagers get more and more freaked out.
Eventually they accuse the crew members of being witches or spirits. The evidence is overwhelming. (And, frankly, the accusation is essentially correct!) But here's some of the testimony:
> MILO: So, I said to young Harry, I'm not one for rainy days and grey skies. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, he called up the spirits to do his bidding. A second later, there wasn't a cloud in the sky.
> EDITH: I was up near Ballahick Farm with little Mary. She was playing near the well. Somehow, she lost her footing and fell in. I was so frightened I didn't know what to do. So I ran to the Colbys to get some help. But when we returned, there was Mary in the meadow talking with Katie O'Clare. There wasn't a scratch on her. Katie said I must've been mistaken when I saw her fall. There was no mistake.
> GRACE: Last Sunday, after his sermon, I saw Father Mulligan vanish into thin air.
These are most certainly the actions of people with supernatural powers. But their sheer non-malevolence is called out by another villager seeking to defend the crew:
> Katie showed me things that are beyond our comprehension. They have machines that I can't begin to describe, but not once have they used them against us. Quite the opposite, in fact.
> Milo, you said you didn't like the rain and young Harry Kim made it go away.
> Edith Mulcahey herself said that Katie O'Clare pulled her daughter from the well and out of harm's way.
> These are not the deeds of spirits and mischief makers.
Oh, I hate those episodes. It's the Fairhaven episodes, and it's not even a mediaeval village, that makes it worse.
It's late 19th/early 20th century Ireland, allegedly, because they have trains and there's talk of revolution in the air. The setting looks like it's on the east coast, Janeway's character is supposedly to come from the south-west, which is also seemingly only a hop, skip and jump away, and there's also confusion with the west coast.
The elements are all *terrible* and it's precisely the kind of "people who know nothing of history or the context invent a Hollywood version of diddley-aye leprechaun top o' the mornin' Ireland" that you would expect.
The defender is probably Janeway's love interest? Whom she deliberately meddled with the original characterisation to get rid of his wife (murder!) and make him more appealing to her tastes and more likely to fall in love with her, which can't be said to be "not once have they used their machines against us". 😁
On the other hand "full of lazy stereotypes" is exactly what I would expect of a holodeck Irish village programmed by Tom Paris...
Oh yeah. Funnily enough it was full of tiny details that they obviously attempted to get right, like having the name of the train station be in both Irish and English.
Then they invented the worst "pig in the parlour stereotypes" 🙄 I was particularly cross about the church, because the interior looked like the Gallarus oratory - all damp stone. That's not what a 19th century/20th century Irish Catholic church interior would have looked like *at all*.
This video is like it was uploaded via a bucket, but about 4:38 in is their idea of what a priest preaching a homily in a Catholic church of the time would be like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LigxKWsd-K0
What it really would have looked like:
https://caoimhindebhailis.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/image-14.png
https://catholicnewsherald.com/images/stories/Ourfaith/priest-vestments.jpg
Granted, the image they presented really would fit with "what hologram from society that has no idea about religion thinks is appropriate".
> Funnily enough it was full of tiny details that they obviously attempted to get right, like having the name of the train station be in both Irish and English.
Huh. Would that have been the case prior to independence?
> The defender is probably Janeway's love interest? Whom she deliberately meddled with the original characterisation to get rid of his wife (murder!) and make him more appealing to her tastes and more likely to fall in love with her, which can't be said to be "not once have they used their machines against us".
Yes, all of that is correct.
I have no particular attachment to the details of the geography of Ireland. But I do like the illustration of "when my daughter fell into a well, Katie rescued her" being used as evidence to condemn Katie to death.
We can generalize the observation to explain why intelligence is not considered a trait that is generally to be admired. An intelligent person is a better friend and also a more effective enemy; whether a person's intelligence is good or bad depends on how they feel about you! Which means that many people correctly view intelligence in others as dangerous and frightening.
When I worked in cybersecurity, people's stories of telling other people what they did for a living fell into two very distinct camps:
1. "How cool! Is it like in the movies?"
2. Becoming visibly uncomfortable and trying to avoid speaking to the person in the future.
Yeah, but that wasn't "Katie pulled my daughter out of the well", it was "When I came back, there was no well and Katie told me I imagined the whole thing".
Put yourself in the place of being told that "that thing you remember never happened, look, there isn't even that building that you said was there". We call it 'gaslighting' now, and it's not held to be well-intentioned on the part of the person doing it, or beneficial for the recipient of it.
"Katie got a rope and pulled my daughter out" is something within the bounds of physical reality. "Katie made the well disappear" is not, and is going to look like magic.
The well didn't disappear. It was still there. The (false) claim was that the girl never fell in, not that there never was a well.
Denying that you have done something that isn't allowed, such as using sorcery, is the baseline expectation. No one is going to be surprised when a witch claims that a magical result can be explained by some other means.
Put yourself in the place where you receive an anonymous (correct) tip that your daughter is appearing on a porn site, but when you ask all your friends, to a man they deny any knowledge of the videos or the tip. You're positive one of them is lying. Does that matter to you? Would you expect anything different?
"The elements are all *terrible* and it's precisely the kind of "people who know nothing of history or the context invent a Hollywood version of diddley-aye leprechaun top o' the mornin' Ireland" that you would expect."
This smacks of anti-Darby O'Gill And The Little People bigotry! Disgusting! Next you'll try to tell us Brigadoon isn't a documentary.
Since this was in the time of the Protestant Reformation, the king (James VI) was Presbyterian (and explicitly had been raised as such, his mother the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots having been faced with rebellions by the Protestant noblemen of her reign) then prayers to the saints *would* have been considered by the clergy and nobles of the time as magic, Papist superstition which was itself devil-worship.
The North Berwick witch trials were complicated by the background history of the rebellions against Mary, the murders committed by Scottish noblemen, the interference with James' upbringing by said noblemen determined to create a God-fearing Protestant king who would respect the limits of his authority over them, and attempts on James' life.
Belief that witches could raise storms then met the perfect opportunity in the storms which prevented his betrothed Anne, princess of Denmark, from crossing over to Scotland. James then sailed to meet her, but also met with storms on the way back. This triggered gossip and rumours in Denmark about possible witchcraft, sparked by the witch trials happening in Germany at the time, and thus trickled down to Scotland and "are people trying to kill the king?" Since there had been at least one attempt on his life, and since anti-Catholicism was ongoing, this easily morphed into "are Catholics trying to kill the king? trying to do it by witchcraft?"
The Danes had held their own witch trials about the storms preventing Anne from sailing to Scotland, and had convicted and burned women for it. So James set up his own tribunal.
And of course, if you're a midwife (a suspicious profession because of abortion, still births and potions to prevent conception or bring about miscarriages) who uses Catholic prayers and charms (superstitious magic) that makes you the perfect suspect for a witch-hunt, true or not.
It's a good thing witches don't exist, or probably one of them would curse your penis to disappear (illusorily) for this post.
As he said, they do. I know some. And I've seen spells have meaningful effect. Belief is a powerful thing.
Weird how no major businesses or governments take advantage of the mystical power of sorcery. Must be thanks to the incredible religiosity of modern states, so that in deference to God they refuse to consort with devilish power.
Witchcraft is apparently a booming multi-billion dollar industry: https://www.marketplace.org/2020/02/14/witchcraft-goes-mainstream-becomes-big-business/
Granted, you could argue that corporations are merely profiting off the occult beliefs of customers. But there's some evidence that a significant number of major corporate and financial leaders do practice occultism themselves, in places as varied as South Korea (https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/opinion/international/kim-when-ceos-embrace-the-occult.html), India (https://www.quora.com/Do-billionaires-use-astrology), and even here in the United States (https://www.thecut.com/2015/07/tech-bros-discover-the-occult.html). Grant Morrison, a famous comic book creator, screenwriter, and practicing chaos magician, has made quite a bit of extra money for himself by giving lectures on sigil magic to corporate advertising departments, on the basis that logos and brands are effectively sigils.
None of this is to suggest that magic actually works in a supernatural sense, simply that a great deal of people - including those in positions of great power and influence within polite secular society - seem to believe it's useful, erroneously or otherwise.
There's a big difference between "I'm selling you witchcraft" (obvious - I'll sell any damn thing) or "I'm using witchcraft to pick my stocks or acquisitions" (which anyone can *claim* to work, since throwing darts at a board is better than your average investor) and "I'm using witchcraft to make your dick not work, so I can sell you Viagra."
Not sure what you are on about. I literally stated that witches do indeed exist. There is a thriving Wiccan community in most countries. And a small percentage of those people are in it for personal gain and dark reasons. They have no magic - so if you mean witches that fly around on brooms and turn people into newts don't exist then no kidding.
Millions of non magical witches that can and do curse and spell people and some people are gullible enough to believe the magic is real so it works on them. It is the same as Placebo in medicine.
In the 90s Russia I saw plently of apparently completely serious ads offering curse-removal services. This sort of thing seemed to have about the same level of reputation as astrology and divination.
Yep. Even though it beggars belief there are still millions of people that believe in astrology and divination and curses. Scary in this day and age with our level of education and understanding of the universe.
And 90s Russia was a pretty chaotic and miserable place (capitalism just became an excuse for widescale looting and gangsters rose to power), another parallel with our medieval peasant village...
There is apparently a Witches Market in La Paz, Bolivia, where you can buy dried frogs and llama fetuses to use in witchcraft, or hire a witch of your own for some purpose
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sl3hkONqa2M
Apparently this is what happens if you _don't_ persecute witches, they wind up taking over a whole street and filling it with creepy objects for sale.
> You can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum. So, why haven’t you? Might the witches’ spiritual successors be desperate to delegitimize the only thing they’re truly afraid of - the vibrant, time-tested witch hunting expertise of the Catholic Church?
Ironic, since that very book was condemned by the Inquisition. The Church position is that millions of Satanists really can be wrong, they are all outweighed by the Church hierarchy.
The Malleus is fascinating for many reasons, but today I think it's most interesting in that its methodology is largely shared by the likes of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, the most popular of the woke "anti-racist" crowd. I addressed that in the first in a series of essays on their work (link to full essay below): "In their books, Kendi and DiAngelo appeal not to methods of proof, but to the methods explicated in another, similarly popular book written centuries ago – a book that also falsely assumed a specific ill intent was the cause of bad outcomes. That book was the Malleus Maleficarum (usually translated as the Hammer of Witches), a treatise on witchcraft … The policies advocated in the Malleus were implemented across Europe. The policies advocated in DiAngelo’s and Kendi’s books are just now starting to find their way into American law. Before they potentially become entrenched, it’s worth considering the similarities in the approach of these books, and how they diverge from the humanistic and Enlightenment values that helped end the witch hunts and usher in the conditions for human flourishing … Kendi has tweeted: “The heartbeat of racism is denial. And too often, the more powerful the racism, the more powerful the denial.” And DiAngelo also considers denials of racism proof of racism. As she writes in White Fragility, “None of the white people whose actions I describe in this book would identify as racist. In fact, they would most likely identify as racially progressive and vehemently deny any complicity with racism. Yet all their responses illustrate white fragility and how it holds racism in place.” The Malleus describes how a suspected sorceress should be questioned by her inquisitors, instructing them to “[n]ote that for the most part sorceresses initially make a denial [that sorceresses exists], and hence a greater suspicion arises than if they responded, ‘Whether they exist or not I leave to my betters.’” According to the Malleus, not only does a denial indicate guilt, but the only exculpatory response is the accused’s expression of deference to one’s “betters” among the clerisy’s academic elite -- whose doctrines posit the existence of witches. And similarly, as DiAngelo wrote in her dissertation, her “primary measure” of white racism is “the larger body of research in the Whiteness literature” – a Whiteness literature that posits omnipresent racism ..."
Full essay here: https://paultaylor.substack.com/p/a-critique-of-kendi-diangelo-hannah
I think his claim is that saying "witches don't exist" is suspicious, not that saying "I am not a witch" is suspicious in and of itself.
I mean, if you say "racism doesn't exist", that also would be treated as suspicious, and I've reasonably-frequently encountered recitals that this is evidence of being a racist.
I think I would (informally, outside of legal, especially criminal, contexts) probably treat a strong claim that "racism doesn't exist" as mild evidence towards some amount of racism, if it comes from a reasonably intelligent-seeming person.
That, or trolling.
That statement would, after all, only be true if there wasn't a single person in the entire world who harbored any beliefs of the "my race is inherently superior and of greater moral value than other race(s) X"-variety, which I have, to my own satisfaction, empirically verified to be untrue; in quite an obvious way.
That’s quite poor reasoning, given that many antiracists define racism as an omnipresent powerful system which conspires to oppress and gaslight others. A lot of people don’t believe in that.
If someone said "Racism doesn't exist" as a blanket statement, and then followed it up with "Well actually, when I said "racism," I meant "the broadest possible definition of racism in use, described in language that makes it sound like a conspiracy theory"" I don't think it would convince me that they were arguing in good faith.
(Side note - if anyone ever gets involved in this sort of discourse, using "systemic racism" to refer specifically to the broad power-structure stuff will save you a lot of hassle fighting over definitions.)
I was typing your side note when a "new comment" popped up, so I won't push "post"
I agree that Godoth’s wording of the definition is questionable, but the point does sort of hold.
No doubt you’ve heard of “you can’t be racist against white people” which basically is saying that a power structure needs to be unbalanced for racism to be “real.” If you don’t think that the power system is unbalanced, then you could believe that no one is “racist” in that since, even if they were blatantly discriminatory. I’m not claiming it’s a good definitition, but it’s one that gets bandied about, and allows one to hold a “there’s no racism” via (what I would consider a little) naivete rather than actual racial preferences held by themselves
Yes, that's true, and I very well aware of that;
but the people using that definition when they say "racism" (without any qualifiers like "systemic") are, in from what I can remember of my experience, literally never the people who make an unqualified statement of "racism doesn't exist".
Unless, as I said, they're trolling. (Or I guess with an obvious implied "that kind of" in front.)
So I'll discard that argument for why it is "bad reasoning" as inapplicable, until I encounter one.
One could argue (from a Robin Hanson-esque) perspective that racism in the belief-sense doesn't exist in a meaningful way because such beliefs are always post-hoc and imaginary. What would exist, in this analysis, is in-group preference and cognitive bias, and various mistaken beliefs downstream from these two contain items such as "racism" ("my group is smarter, prettier, and funnier than all others") and "anti-racism" ("my group is morally culpable in a way not accessible to simple, childlike, innocent groups") are not "real" in any way that matters.
(Note that I do not imagine my two joke examples of what racism and anti-racism mean are all-inclusive. I can imagine someone saying, "Yes of course my group is the ugliest, dumbest, and most exploitable of all human groups which is why I hope the AI overlord will leave us alone after turning everyone else into paperclips -- fuck those guys" and I suppose we'd have to score that as 'genocidal racism'.)
Sort of fair using a non-literal reading of my comment; I very literally meant someone making a completely unqualified statement of "racism doesn't exist", not within some explanatory or assumed/implied context.
The view you describe here would be a pretty big qualifier and would definitely go against common usage.
It seems I once again misjudged people's tendency to take a comment that was intended very literally as less so, and/or my ability to convey the degree of intended literalness of a comment I write!
*updates*
(Actually, I did sort of expect at least one less-literal reading misjudging my intended meaning. Not saying you necessarily did, maybe you just wanted to make me aware of this slightly unusual possibility as to what "racism doesn't exist" could mean)
Heh, yes I meant the "one could argue" opening line as a marker for thought-experiments. All comments on the internet are just one person riffing off someone else's words, sometimes with the most tenuous of connections in terms of meaning or relevance.
However, I personally would receive "racism doesn't exist" as a strong clue that my interlocutor is unusually intelligent and probably means something interesting and clever. Even if I didn't know the sense meant I'd be excited to find out.
Ordinarily I hear only tired defenses or tired attacks. The lower levels of discourse are all people accusing each other of racism: the spectrum from "All whites are racist!" and "Trump hates Latinx people!" to "The Left has low expectations for black folk because they're paternalistic racists!" and "Democrats were the party of the KKK!" does not (generally) contain anything at all interesting or profound.
A note, St John Chrysostom doesn't say any of that in the homily referenced:
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/200162.htm
The only semblance is him quoting the disciples saying "If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry". So the author seems to have mistaken the quote for St John's words, and then the rest is just the author editorializing.
Part of a long tradition of people misquoting St John to make him sound completely insane. The Name of the Rose is a notable offender.
Various authors of his day, and perhaps he himself as well, I cannot quite recall, really did say inflammatory things about women, but only within the specific context of advocating celibacy (for men) generally and monasticism in particular. The same authors also wrote beautifully to and for women in the same way, sometimes favorably comparing the bridegroom Christ to mortal men, sometimes talking about the terrors of childbirth, etc. Taken out of context they could seem misandrist or antinatalist.
Ancient writers, especially the ones educated in the ancient rhetorical traditions, have to be read as a whole - or at least a chapter at a time, otherwise you end up with moronic misquoting (like the author of Malleus Maleficarum). Knowing that he was wrong about that, which was obvious and easy to reference, you wonder what he did with other sources.
You're completely right about the writings of church fathers about women and celibacy. St. John Chrysostom wrote some scathing things against women, and some really sweet things about women in relation to how husbands should treat their wives.
I mean they were misandrist and anti-natalist. The church father were mostly fucking evil lunatics.
This post is a new favorite of mine—bizarre subject matter coupled with deep insights into human nature (with a gentle sense of humor throughout) is very much my jam :)
> His arguments ring hollow to modern ears, and honestly neither God nor the Devil comes out looking very good. God isn’t trying to maximize a 21st century utilitarian view of the Good, He’s trying to maximize His own glory. Allowing some evil helps with this, because then He can justly punish it (and being just is glorious) or mercifully forgive it (and being merciful is also glorious). But, if God let the Devil kill everyone in the world, then there would be no one left to praise God’s glory, plus people might falsely think God couldn’t have stopped the Devil if he’d wanted to. So the glory-maximizing option is to give the Devil some power, but not too much.
An interesting window in contemporary morality: God is vain and Devil is vengeful. And vice versa, I guess.
Just to be clear, "dormitive potency" is not false; we are aware of many such substances today.
The whole problem with "dormitive potency" is that it is an explanation which bears zero information, a canonical example of circular reasoning. "NyQuil puts you to sleep because it puts you to sleep" is a stupid thing to say, but that doesn't mean the premise, "NyQuil puts you to sleep," is false.
This kind of "explanation" was and is common in the medical field. When doctors do it to me, they tend to immediately point it out, as in 'we call this "desquamation", which just means "it's peeling",' or 'the condition is called "pruritis", which means "an itch".'
That could be because my personal affect suggests I won't be comforted by the simpler "you have pruritis", or because standards of how to deal with your patients have changed.
One thing I find missing here is an appreciation for how different the "physics" of the 1500s was from today. In that earlier world everyone knew that there were any number of spirits, sprites, demons, angels, and supernatural whatnot wandering around the world, and causing all kinds of mischief, and most of the weird coincidences that one came across. Things that went bump in the night could very easily be a werebear stumbling over a rake in the yard -- why not? Such things were known to exist in the forest, so-and-so had seen one, and besides it just made sense, everyone agrees such a thing might occur.
People just knew there were supernatural causes for all kinds of things, no doubt in part because that tradition had been handed down for generations, but probably also because people just naturally infer intelligence and motivation to complex processes they don't otherwise understand (the modern equivalent being the ease with which people infer intelligence and motivation to GPT-3, or the extreme ease with which people believe a computer can be programmed to think and feel just like us, cf. ELIZA and its -- embarassing, for us -- success).
In such a world, where supernatural causes flood the world, is it a stretch to believe that some people have found a way to use them to malignant ends? Of course not. Rather, it's as natural as breathing, as natural as (say) the modern tendency to believe that hackers can cause a nuclear war, because we all believe all computers can be subverted over the Internet, we heard a story about it for sure, and besides it just stands to reason, everyone knows such a thing is reasonable.
We owe a great debt to the Enlightenment thinkers, and to some extent the Church, who slowly between the two of them persuaded everyone that there *is* no zoology of spirits causing my keys to not be where I am 100% certain I left them, or my car to not start on the very morning I am late for an important appointment. The Church desired this end for its own reasons -- to reserve the supernatural to God alone -- and the scientists of the Enlightenment wanted it to be true that every effect could be explained by a mindless cause, the mechanism for which could be teased out, and ideally written down in equations.
They succeeded so well that these days we can laugh at the world in which supernatural causes were considered entirely plausible for everything from the dog's weird howling one night to our sister's untimely death when she'd been feeling just fine the day before. These days we believe -- with for the most part a no less unreasoning absorbed-in-our-mother's-milk type of blind faith as those of the 1500s believed the contrary -- that *every* strange thing we observe must have a purely physical explanation, that it has to be atoms and molecules doing something sciency which some big-brain could explain in a cool Youtube video -- and any contrary suggestion that it's spirits is just clearly silly.
This is a tremendous advance, not least of all in considerably reducing our ability to wreak cruel tribal vengeance on each other by invoking fears of malignant spiritual alliances -- of witchcraft. It's a pity we take it for granted as much as we do, and pretend it is some natural state of the human mind, some birthright, rather than an inheritance that was hard won by centuries of good thought and disciplined empiricism (and could easily be lost again).
Well said and entirely correct.
But…what does "supernatural" even *mean* in such a world? How are the bugbears that live in the woods any less "natural" than the actual bears?
That is a good point. I should have emphasized that for quite a lot of human beings, evil unseen forest spirits were part of the same continuum that included cats and ploughs and the Senate, without the modern sharp dividing line between them.
And still are, in some places, even civilized ones like Japan, where casual Shintoism is perfectly ordinary and respectable.
In modern D&D, there is an objective difference - the bears have creature type "animal" (and are subject to spells that only work on animals) while the owlbears have creature type "beast" (and aren't -- this is not a symmetrical situation; there are no spells that single out "beasts"). (There are bugbears, too, but those are "goblins", intelligent humanoids with no relation to bears.)
You can find quite a few people wondering what the in-world difference is supposed to be.
"beast" and "monstrosity"*
Sure. But I mean for people at the time, who actually believed in these things.
My assumption was always that they maintain themselves through some innate magic, whereas animals can get by on purely mundane means (I also lean towards that most magical creatures should be crippled by an anti-magic field, but that’s a bit heretical)
Even back in the ancient world they understood there was a difference. A human or regular animal couldn't do something while invisible, but a god or demon could. They understood that Jesus's miracles were something that no normal human could do without the help of god or demons. There was some intuitive understanding of the normalcy of experience and the physical world and some extra supernatural power only saints or witches could access.
Replace the word "supernatural" with "demonic" and the distinction becomes very understandable. (Or "angelic", or "divine", in the case of things that are good).
Things and events either are demon-related or they are not.
Some fairy tale creatures were actually understood to be demons or angels in a particular form. The concept of goblin/imp and that of demon overlapped. There was a theory that elves were those angels who had stayed neutral during the war in heaven. Merlin was the spawn of a demon, hence his extraordinary powers.
Huh, I thought Merlin got his powers from God.
"They say the oldest and strongest fear is the fear of the unknown."
I am legitimately interested to know if you're aware where this concept came from.
I don't know. (Aaah!)
It's from the first line of HP Lovecraft's "Supernatural Horror in Literature:" "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." (https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss) Written in 1927, that text has had the same effect on horror literature that JRR Tolkien had on fantasy: the first sentence in particular has become a fundamental, core assumption that is not always articulated, and rarely challenged. To the best of my knowledge, the insight originates with HPL, which would make it less than a century old.
I was very interested to see it make its way to this particular article.
Scott is a Lovecraft fan (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/19/i-liked-lovecraft-countless-primaeval-aeons-before-it-was-cool/), so it wouldn't surprise me if he's making a direct reference.
Oh, thank you. Hadn't made that connection.
For the kids here, it was one of those geek in-jokes like 42 (from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and Monty Python in the later part of the twentieth century. Most people could pick out Jason and Freddy or Dracula and the Wolfman, but you didn't know who Cthulhu was unless you played D&D (or Call of Cthulhu) and read comic books.
>I remember my high school psychology class, how boggled I was when I learned lots of people often confess falsely, even when they’re not under torture or being pressured or anything
I'd like to see this one backed up. The false confession narratives I'm familiar with all involve significant pressure, or deceit, or deficient mental capacity, and usually all three.
There was the guy who confessed to killing Jonbenet Ramsey.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/LegalCenter/story?id=2369005&page=1
Ah. Yes, I neglected "notoriety-seeking and/or mental illness." Is that what Scott is referring to here?
Lots of people fall into one of the categories of being under pressure, deceived, mentally ill, seeking notoriety, or mentally deficient (including unusually suggestible). If you're suggesting that people who do not fall into these categories would not falsely confess, well, maybe, but there are enough people in those categories (and often people leading apparently normal lives!) to make false confession a serious social problem.
I don't think you read what I wrote carefully. Scott said, "lots of people often confess falsely, even when they’re not under torture or being pressured or anything." That's what I'm questioning. Is this the case?
This is an n of 1 and doesn't involve an actual false confession, but....
Several years ago, a friendly acquaintance of mine was murdered. At the day/time it happened, I was several miles away, in a suburb to the city I lived in. I was eating gyros with a friend. After I learned about the murder (the next day), I kept worrying and retracing my steps to assure myself I didn't do it.
To be clear, I didn't confess (because I didn't do it) but I had a tremendous sense of....not guilt, but fear that it was possible. I'm not sure exactly where that feeling came from, but it happens occasionally, where I think I might be guilty of doing something I know I didn't do.
And again, my experience doesn't prove anything. For all you know, I'm making the whole thing up. And even though I'm not, I don't count as "lots of people." But I can easily see something like that happening "a lot," maybe not frequently, but enough to be a thing.
I don't really know how to respond to that, except to say that I find your story plausible.
I'm still curious as to what Scott's talking about though.
My theory on the penis stealing illusion:
Some guy, for weird psychological reasons, firmly believes that his penis has been stolen. But when a doctor or priest or whoever examines him, his penis is right there where it should be. Therefore he must have been cursed to falsely believe that his penis has been stolen.
Given that Kramer is certain that the illusion is only sometimes cast in ways which fool people other than the target, this is probably correct.
Sommers is a curious cat: he kinda gives me "if Abraham Van Helsing was a real person" vibes. And quite learned despite everything: I tried reading his book on werewolves, but could hardly go a page without running into an extended, untranslated quotation in Latin, German, Italian, French, Greek..... 3smart5me.
I don't know if the whole "witch hunting" phenomenon can be understood without first looking at the phenomenon of witchcraft the world over. On this note, something I've read in several reliable sources but haven't looked into specifically: supposedly the early Iroquois had a belief that there were only two ways anyone could possibly die: either by drowning, or by being hexed by a witch. So whenever someone died (unless they drowned), it was blamed on witchcraft from an enemy tribe, which demanded blood reprisal. I do not know whether this belief existed alongside a parallel practice of witches actually attempting to hex people in enemy tribes.
Wow. This is truly grim. Fuck Henry Kramer and everyone who was like him. You're way more charitable to that misogynistic woman-hater than I am. I think when the witches stole his little penis they also got his every drop of wisdom and compassion he may have once possessed.
I believe that most of organized religion is an ancient nightmare from which humanity has yet to fully awaken.
And hundreds of millions of people still believe that evidence-free shit. They pray to god to help them get that promotion, or for their team to win the game on Saturday. They might as well pray to Santa, since god is just Santa Claus for adults. Ya know, the old dude keeping track of who's naughty and nice, with presents (Heaven) for the good and lumps of coal (Hell) for the bad. I always think if you're asking magical old white men for favors, why not pray to Gandalf or Dumbledore? They're equally fictional and powerless. . .
Real women died by the thousands because of superstitious ignorance and fear wrapped in a cloak of religion. And real women continue to die to this day because of patriarchal oppression wearing clerical robes -- anyone heard from Iran lately?
Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and almost all of the rest. . . . why don't you all go drown in the oceans of misdeeds and suffering you have caused for centuries. Full disclosure: your corpses will NOT be exonerated.
I know very well that in their modern, "kindler, gentler" incarnations, most religions are much more benign -- I helped out at a church pumpkin patch sale last weekend. And my sister teaches Sunday school at her church.
But this article focused on the very real harm -- torture and death, remember? -- that Church-inspired teachings helped enable. And women continue to suffer and sometimes die because of Church-inspired policy. And not just in Iran. I realize that readers here tend to be an overwhelmingly male group of smart, inside working techies, but restricted abortion access is an issue that threatens womens' health and their lives right now. And which social institution has had the most influence on depriving women of their right to make medical decisions about their own bodies? I'll give you a hint -- it starts with reli and ends in gion.
That experiment has been tried. The USSR was very actively anti-religion, and did its best to convert everyone to atheism. I wouldn't say the results support the notion that this produces a more moral and peaceful people.
How did I know you were going to quote abortion?
Well then, let me take the radical feminist view that as a man, you get *no* say at *all* about abortion or women's bodies, even the male feminist support view. As a woman, I can have an opinion (even if, ironically, it's against abortion); as a man, you shut your patriarchal mouth up.
You can't be one of the 'good ones' because there are no good ones.
(Any system can find an oppressor class to define).
Huh. You don't suppose any thinking person -- and certainly no woman -- might for reasons other than brainwashing by her Svengali priest come to believe killing a baby in utero is wrong? Of course not. Naturally the only source for a woman's ethics would be the nearest male authority, right? Good thing women have you to protect them.
I am mostly agnostic on this issue, for all kinds of reasons, but I phrase it that way deliberately, because I think one ought to make the difficult choice with eyes wide open -- not shying away from what you're doing by wrapping it up in soothing metaphors. You're killing something, there is no question. It's a thing that, left to itself, would without question become a human being. We usually call those things "babies" and that is certainly what any mother who cherishes the life within her calls it. So we should be 100% clear on what we're doing -- even if, in the end, we decide that killing the baby is the right thing to do. I am not a blanket pacifist -- I agree sometimes killing is necessary, if always a black mark on our species. But I prefer to be crudely honest about what we're doing. I would use the same brutal phrasing if I were talking about euthanasia, or war, or capital punishment. We need to own these choices.
Thinking that abortion is wrong isn't a religious belief. It is obviously wrong from quite a few non-religious axioms.
What I find remarkable is how non-religious people have managed to convince themselves that it is acceptable. That is what really boggles the mind.
Just to maximize murkiness, Exodus 21:22 states that causing a miscarriage is punishable only by fine, along the lines of property damage, suggesting that unborn children are not people yet.
Wow! I haven’t seen a comment like this since 2014
I don't know what that means. But it was equally true then. And will be equally true in 2034. And in 2114.
The intense emotional phrasing of this comment ironically reminds me of the writing style of my hyper religious uncle.
Oh, I hope I didn't interject too much intensity into this light-hearted, humorous just-n-time for Halloween discussion about the Church-sanctioned murders of women! I must have mis-read the room. . .
I mean, it's not like any women or girls are getting killed these days by religious zealots. . . .
Not just women, the witch craze was equal opportunity and men were accused and died as well. And even Kramer, who definitely had bats in the belfry, was constrained by the necessity to have a trial - you couldn't just rock up to a village, start sniffing out witches, and having a burning in the square as you liked.
I'd like to believe in the easy 60s notion of no guru, no method, no teacher, no religion, no pigs, no state, man, but I've seen too much of human nature. We give up religion. Fine. Men are still killing women for various reasons, and not because "My girlfriend is a witch".
See this fine example of a man:
https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/man-threatened-to-chop-up-girlfriend-after-she-refused-to-eat-dinner-he-cooked-1384149.html
Well, to be fair, that's mostly just because we're much more violent in general. In the US 89% of murderers are men[1]. But it's still the case that men mostly kill other men. In the US a male murderer kills another man 70% of the time and a woman 30% of the time. A female murderer kills another woman 25% of the time and a man 75% of the time. (That women more often kill a man is normally explained by the fact that most female murderers are killing a spouse or lover.)
The disparity in cross-sex murder is surprisingly (to me) not as lopsided as one might have naively imagined. In the US the number of women killed by men (1733) is about 3 times the number of men killed by women (515), which is not as much lower as I would have guessed. The women are definitely well into silver medal territory, but they're not completely failing to hold up their side of the sorrow.
Another strange thing: the sex disparity in offense is not uniform worldside. If we sort this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homicide_statistics_by_gender
...there are 6 countries with a nontrivial number of murders in which women are more than 50% of the victims: Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Latvia, and Switzerland. What's up with the Asians? In India also we have 17,700 (41%) female victims, in Burma 3,100 (39%), Bangladesh 1,500 (37%).
Must be all the secret Catholics in East Asia, I guess, promoting violence against women.
---------
[1] All data from https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-2017/topic-pages/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6.xls
The hypothesis I’ve heard is that as a society becomes more peaceful, the rate of guys murdering some random guy at a bar who offended them decreases faster than the rate of guys murdering their wife or girlfriend in a fit of jealousy, and therefore you end up with women being a higher fraction of murder victims the less overall murder you have.
Slightly surprised to see Latvia on that list; I thought they had a relatively high murder rate by European standards.
If we sort that list by total murder rate, Japan comes in at #201 (0.2/100k people), South Korea at #181 (0.9), New Zealand at #182 (0.9), and Switzerland at #195 (0.6), so the argument might work there.
But India comes in at #122 (3.5), Burma at #31 (15.2), and Bangladesh at #135 (2.7), which aren't unusually low rates of violence. The US is at #108 (4.7) for reference.
Hmm. Maybe they need to add some epicycles for cultural differences about the status of women.
One would think, yes.
Careful not to cut yourself on that edge.
You are so close but actually every tragedy you describe happened because of defection from the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
Witch burnings? Protestants. The teaching of the magisterium is that witches and their powers do not exist.
Iran? They’re Muslims, a particularly odd variety of Arianism among other things. Wouldn't be happening (and doesn't) in the Church.
"Restricted abortion access is an issue that threatens womens' health"? The principle of double effect covers cases where there is an actual medical need. But you can't kill an unborn baby for no reason 😎.
You didn't mention the Spanish Inquisition, but it pioneered many modern standards of a fair trial.
When someone has the courage and bravery to come forward as a victim of having their genitals stolen by a witch, we ought to listen and believe them. I don't see any possible reason why a victim would lie about this, and honestly Henry Kramer was retraumatising these victims by demanding the level of testimony that he did.
Yeah, I'm not as antireligious as you are, but I thought he was a bit too easy on the witch-finders. (After all, witchcraft accusations occur in non-European cultures too.) They really did kill a lot of people, and it was similar to the things they did to Jews in medieval Europe, with some of the same themes (poisoning wells, etc.)
> Is a good guy with a witch the only way to stop a bad guy with a witch?
Basically the plot of Night Watch series right here. Highly recommended if you're into urban fantasy and long conversations about the nature of morality.
Keep in mind the author (edit: Sergey Lukyanenko) is a ruzzist. One of the latter books in the series literally starts with commentary on Ukraine.
The author? You mean Terry Pratchet, Scott, or Henry Kramer?
> Terry Pratchet
You are thinking about the wrong Nights Watch.
I assume it's this Russian book series by Sergei Lukyanenko. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_(Lukyanenko_novel)
Lukyanenko, author of the series Loweren was referencing.
The author is a massive asshole and a rashist, but the books are great (and the movies are mediocre).
Haven't read the latest parts of the series, only Night, Day, Twilight, Last (and Black Palmira's Face written by a different author).
The movie was a total mess but it was also overflowing with style (a lot of which was _not_ in the books). Tekken scrying, gopnik sorcerers, light mages being the literal power grid company... a lot of wasted potential there.
Night Watch is alright but has a definite "all edge and no point" vibe to it. I'd probably love it back in high school, as an adult I found it grating.
Now I’m confused. I read the damn book a long time ago and all I remember is that witches definitely stole penises en masse and kept them (as pets, I guess) happily chirping away in little birds’ nests?
I should have read the whole piece. Of course that was an illusion too. I’m disappointed.
I think the correct modern day comparison for the Malleus Maleficarum is clearly a legal brief of some kind, maybe one prepared by somebody at the CIA or FBI to offer background and a legal theory to justify some program for taking action against terrorists or something.
The first few sections make empirical and theological arguments that witches exist and are a real problem. My understanding is that for most of the middle ages witchcraft was viewed as kind of a folk superstition and treated pretty skeptically by the more respectable people. See Dante classifying it as a brand of deception, Charlemagne prescribing the death penalty for witch-hunters on the grounds that witches and witch-hunters both believe in witchcraft. Both of those were significantly earlier, but I think it still suggests that the theological arguments he's making are relevant for persuading skeptical readers. It doesn't necessarily go without saying that the church authorities think real witchcraft is even a thing.
Then he establishes that witches are actually a species of heretic, and thus under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. That's why the comparisons to Jews, and Pagans, and other types of heretics are relevant. This is also a reason for the emphasis on the idea that the witches gain their powers by explicit pacts with the Devil in order to subvert Christianity. If they were just casting curses, that would be a civil issue. If they're casting curses because they want to destroy the faith, then it's a job for the Inquisition.
Having argued for a potentially skeptical audience that witches are a real problem, and within the jurisdiction of the Inquisition as an institution devoted to suppressing heresy, he outlines his recommended procedures for dealing with the problem.
+1
Now I'm imagining Colin Powell's UN speech except he is holding up a silvered glass bottle reputed to contain a witch (Pitt Rivers Museum object 1926.6.1).
> The Holy Inquisition is forbidden to burn anyone as a witch until they confess with their own lips, and confessions obtained under torture don’t count. THIS IS AN EXTREMELY FAKE RULE. The first way it is fake: a confession obtained under torture doesn’t count, but you can torture the witch, let her confess during the torture, and then later, after the torture is over, say “Okay, you confessed, so obviously you’re a witch, please confirm”. If she doesn’t confirm, you can torture her more and repeat the process. The second way it is fake is that you are allowed to lie to her in basically any way to make her confess. Kramer recommends saying “If you confess, I won’t sentence you to any punishment”. Then when she confesses, you hand her over to a different judge for the sentencing phase, and he sentences her to the punishment. Or a judge can promise mercy, “with the mental reservation that he means he will be merciful to himself or the State, for whatever is done for the safety of the State is merciful”.
Ignoring the parts about torture, this is a good description of the American justice system today: you can't punish someone unless they confess first[1], and you are allowed to tell a suspect whatever lies you feel like, including false promises of leniency, in order to trick them into confessing.
[1] Technically possible, but if I'm remembering right, more than 95% of American convictions are plea bargains.
In theory not any more, but certainly in the 1920s there was the belief in the use by police of beating confessions out of suspects:
From "The Mistake of the Machine", 1914 Father Brown story:
"Flambeau and his friend the priest were sitting in the Temple Gardens about sunset; and their neighbourhood or some such accidental influence had turned their talk to matters of legal process. From the problem of the licence in cross-examination, their talk strayed to Roman and mediaeval torture, to the examining magistrate in France and the Third Degree in America."
1922 New York Times article:
https://www.nytimes.com/1922/01/29/archives/says-usual-police-practice-is-to-club-rubber-hose-and-blackjack-are.html
"The beating of suspects with rubber hose, blackjacks or other weapons to induce confession is a widespread practice in the Police Department and is largely due to failure to use legitimate detective methods with success, according to city Magistrate Joseph E. Corrigan."
"The 'American Method' - the Third Degree"
https://academic.oup.com/book/3398/chapter-abstract/144501532?redirectedFrom=fulltext
"One mystery in interrogation law is why American police, but not English police, developed the highly coercive “third degree” tactic. One explanation is a coarsening of the American culture that did not happen, at least to the same degree, in England. The Civil War put Americans face-to-face with death and destruction to a degree never before seen in human history. Americans became indifferent to suffering when it was happening to those perceived as “the other.” American cities grew dense and dangerous during this period. Handguns were easily available. Organized crime infiltrated our cities and our police forces. The Black Hand, an early form of organized crime, resisted normal methods of solving crime. Getting a confession became an appealing shortcut. Drawing largely on newspaper archives, the chapter presents vivid accounts of police third degree, sometimes called “sweating.” The third degree largely disappeared by 1940 due to increasing public awareness and condemnation; moderating or declining crime rates; the advent of more scientific methods to solve crimes, such as the lie detector; and increasing police professionalism, best exemplified by the FBI."
"How Police Interrogation Works":
https://people.howstuffworks.com/police-interrogation.htm
"Police interrogations weren't always so complex. Until the early 1900s in the United States, physical abuse was an acceptable (if not legal) method of getting a confession. Confessions obtained by "third degree" techniques -- deprivation of food and water, bright lights, physical discomfort and long isolation, beating with rubber hoses and other instruments that don't leave marks -- were usually admissible in court as long as the suspect signed a waiver stating the confession was voluntary. Between the 1930s and 1960s, though, a crackdown on police tactics gradually changed the practice of interrogation.
While the Supreme Court had ruled as early as 1897 against involuntary confessions, it was in 1937 that things really started to change. In the case Brown v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court threw out a "voluntary" confession that was obtained after police officers repeatedly strung a suspect up in a tree and whipped him. The Court's decision was clear: Confessions obtained by force cannot be used as evidence at trial. By the 1950s, confessions were considered involuntary not only if police beat the suspect, but also if they held a suspect for an unnecessarily extended period of time, deprived him of sleep, food, water or bathroom facilities, promised some benefit if the suspect confessed or threatened some harm if he didn't."
> while American cops can't (in theory) torture people, they can absolutely keep interrogating someone for 14 hours until they feel that confessing is their only way out.
I feel that this is in fact an important distinction, where the American system is better than the other one.
"Thou Shalt", not "Thou Shall"
Of course. And, I'm a proud prescriptivist, just like everyone else.
Sorry, I don't think I understand what you're trying to say.
Early Modern English obviously had rules (perhaps not entirely standardized) of grammar beyond "use a bunch of French." Sure, there were differences between dialects, but I've yet to see an example of "thou shall" that doesn't just look like a typo.
Anyway, Scott's writing in Modern English, not Early Modern English, and when he wrote "Thou Shall [sic] Have Witches In [sic] Heaven" he seemed to be alluding to Matthew 19:21 "thou shalt have treasure in heaven" (with "treasure" changed to "riches," which I don't think you'd find in any translation that uses "thou").
Scott made a typo, and it is jarring. Even if he were attempting to use some uncommon grammatical construct like "thou shall" from Early Modern English, it would sound weird.
It is easy to dismiss "thou shall" as a typo because the only instances of it that I can find are surrounded in the same text, often on the same page, by a lot more instances of "thou shalt," not because I'm some naïve modern reader.
Whether someone explicitly told people to say "thou shalt" and not "thou shall" back then or not, the rule today is to use "thou shalt" and the intuitive (but apparently never explicitly enforced) rule back then seems to have been almost universally "thou shalt."
I bet, in a lot of the educated Early Modern English-speaking world you'd get weird looks if you went about saying "thou shall" all the time. Even if that's not true, I might give you weird looks if you say "thou shall" today when we have clear and explicit grammar rules telling you to not do that, especially if you are, as Scott is, alluding to a passage that explicitly uses "thou shalt."
> In fact, the word for woman in Latin is femina, which can also have the form feminus, which is literally just fe minus (lesser in faith)!
Apparently Kramer did reason this way, but "fe" for faith is a Romance innovation (entirely Iberian as far as I know). The Latin for "in faith" in this sense would be "fide" (using the ablative of respect, or maybe some other ablative).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fides#Etymology_1
There's no classical Latin parse for "fe" by itself (and Wiktionary says that the -d- was originally there in PIE, predating Latin, so dropping it is entirely post-classical, not classical or pre-classical).
What the heck, Kramer?
Even Summers made fun of this one. I'm also confused what "feminus" is supposed to be - is it the male form of "femina"? When would you ever use that?
(please avoid annoying culture war answers)
Reminds me of The Witcher: the original Polish word means "male witch," and one character becomes a "witcheress": "female male witch."
Speaking of incubi and succubi... Carl Sagan in his book The Demon Haunted World compared stories about incubi and succubi to stories about alien abudctions and finds similarities between the forms of the stories. He uses this to argue that there's Something Going On psychologically that gets explained using the tropes of the times. Of course, it could just be evidence that the aliens have been at it for a very, very long time.
Since they're often said to come at people during the night sleep paralysis seems a plausible explanation.
I can't *quite* recallI whether it was these or (also?) other demons/malicious supernatural entities who, in many accounts, are actually described as "sitting on a person's chest" at night, and preventing them to move.
Also, iirc it's quite common for people in sleep paralysis to see hypnagogic imagery bleeding into what they see of the waking world, sometimes leading to things like seeing shadowy humanoids.
I've basically settled on "yep, almost certainly sleep paralysis interpreted within a pre-scientific worldview" as the Something Going On Psychologically.
Yes, practically speaking that seems a very likely explanation.
I believe you're thinking of mares.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mare_(folklore)
Seems obvious to me. I had sleep paralysis once, and it literally feels like an invisible person sitting on you.
Wet dreams for men. Nocturnal emission of semen without any stimulus by the man himself or another person? What is that about?
It's demons stealing your semen, which they can then use to impregnate women (who also have carnal dreams of sexual congress).
This is how Merlin was born, by his mother having congress at night with a non-human entity.
It is a very plausible explanation, combined with some kind of nocturnal emission. But a boring one.
(And who causes all these things, if not evil spirits?)
What's the story with witches asking for the red-hot iron trial? Was there common knowledge of this kind of thing being milder and more likely to result in exoneration than whatever was the formal alternative?
I guess, people did ask to be tried by hot iron. It was preferable to the alternative.
I read a theory that the priest administering a trial by ordeal had some degrees of freedom in terms of how they administered it - how hot you make the iron, how long you make them hold it, stuff like that - so if you were on good terms with the priest maybe it was a good way to prove your innocence.
Don't know if there's any historical support for it, but it was an interesting idea.
At least as I was taught it in college (and Wikipedia seems to say the same), the trial of red hot iron didn’t demand being able to hang onto the iron. They’d bandage the hand and then check a few days later to see if the burn was healing cleanly (God showing that the subject was in His good graces) or was festering (not).
The professor noted that the waiting time was usually short enough to preserve some ambiguity, but long enough that the community would have had time to mull the case and (though he didn’t express it this way) prime confirmation bias re whether the burn looked like it was totally on the road to recovery, or clearly turning bad.
Of course this vision of the ordeal as an informal jury trial kind of elides the part where suspects, innocent and guilty alike, are burned by red hot iron before it’s determined they’ve done anything wrong. (An earlier instance of “you can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride”.)
If you're innocent, and believe that trial by ordeal is a real thing that works, then obviously you'll want a trial by ordeal! God can be trusted to see your innocence, human courts can't!
(I've seen it speculated that this was, in fact, implicitly the point - the ordeals would frequently be rigged to let anyone who underwent them off, because the people who request them must be REALLY confident in their innocence to pick up what they think is a red-hot iron or whatever. And then everyone sees them "miraculously" unscathed, reinforcing belief in the system. Belief in witchcraft that can magically rig the test would legitimately corrupt this mechanism.)
Sorry for the derail, but: the part about "witchcraft is the worst evil, and everyone needs to put down everything else and take up the fight against witchcraft" made me think, is there actually more evidence for "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" now, than there was for witchcraft back then? It really doesn't look like we've progressed all that much when it comes to epistemology and choosing the most urgent issues.
I think this is an unproductive framing. There is evidence for some racism, and whether it is "systemic" or not is an annoying debate about how you define "systemic" which nobody will ever win. I think this is pretty different from the situation around witchcraft where as far as I know nobody has ever successfully cast a spell, and possibly (again, not sure of this) nobody even tried to be a witch.
"racial inequalities" != "effects of systemic racism". Much like "cows getting sick" != "effects of witchcraft".
No, they exclude certain possible causes from the list of considerations, because the mere act of considering them remotely plausible is itself evidence of racism on the part of the proposer.
"as far as I know, nobody has ever successfully cast a spell" - does this count? "I don't have any friends who are cool enough to have gone through the whole procedure for summoning your Holy Guardian Angel, but from what I read, completing the ritual directly does tend to leave you with an angel who hangs around you and gives you advice. I believe the people who say this is their experience of completing the ritual."
Note that the distinction between "what's going on in your mind" and "what's going on in the material world" wasn't as relevant back then as it is to rationalists in this day and age.
I've worked a couple of rituals that had the desired effect. (More fun than praying!)
Now did they work *because* of the ritual? Who knows...
There literally exist organised political groups who will happily say they think that white people are superior. They have rallies, forums, etc. As far as I'm aware there were no rallies of witches in the streets of Gothenburg. Given the existence of public groups its not unreasonable to think that there may be people with similar beliefs who aren't running around burning things. And that they are likely to have an effect on society and the outcomes of different groups. You can reasonably argue about how common they are and how much to attribute to them vs other factors but saying they don't exist at all is facile
I am not saying they don't exist at all. That would be just as ridiculous as saying there were no witches back then. If you search for five minutes, you can find people claiming to practice witchcraft today, with gatherings, forums, covens and orders and all that jazz. And they often reference treatises on various aspects of magic from the late middle ages and the renaissance. So I am sure that there was an occult underground scene going on, and I am sure that there were people (mostly women) who knew about herbs and knew how to cook up psychedelic concoctions, and I am sure that there were lunatics who cursed other people, who probably suffered from some massive nocebo effects as a result. But these aspects did not combine into some massive conspiratorial evil that must be stopped at all costs.
The theory that witchcraft is still an extant practice in the form of Bolshevism has long been known to those who pay attention to such matters. But Bolshevism was just the beginning of it. The death of the unholy trinity of the Witch Kings Stalin, Hitler and Mao who fueled their reign with mad blood rituals have given way to the subtle, yet infinitely more insidious evil of Socialism. We do not recognize it as such, for it has infiltrated the Western World so deeply, that we do not recognize it. No wonder this, since fish too, will when put to question, reliably fail to accurately describe the nature of water!
Evidence for this outrageous claim, you ask? Recall that even our supposed "Champions of Liberty" Milton Friedman and Friederich von Hayek were corrupted on that fateful night on Pilgrim Mountain. Only van Mises remained stalwart and fled the corruption, turning away from the group in holy and righteous disgust, exclaiming the greatest of condemnations "You're a bunch of socialists!".
Now you, my most skeptical interlocutor objects somewhat justifiedly with "Well then, the whole world may indeed be corrupted by Socialism most foul. But what maketh Socialism to be Witchcraft, the unholy will of the great Deceiver himself?".
Behold then the evidence of the greatest crime of our time! What is the twinned curse of a failing birth rate and a decline in testosterone, if not the stealing of penises en masse!
"on Mount Peril"
"Pilgrim Mount," surely.
Did not know the word. But that works really well too. Thank you, fixed :)
Great book review! And I actually never knew that "Der Hexenhammer" was Malleus Malleficarum in English!
Hexenhammer is Malleus Malleficarum in German; "Hammer of the Witches" in English
*"Meanwhile, the Devil isn’t trying to maximize 21st century utilitarian evil. He’s trying to turn souls away from God. **So although he could curse people directly**, what he actually wants is for humans to sell their soul to him in exchange for curse powers."*
The "although he could curse people directly" thing is technically true, but would miss the entire point of Judeo-Christian worldview vs. good and evil. In TL;DR: form, God created man with free will: a free will that is the one thing *not even he will mess around with directly*, ever.
I mean, technically, God could turn people's minds to whatever he wants them to think. But he does not - apart from maybe confusing someone for a short while ("hardening their hearts" kind of stuff), there are no examples either in Jewish or Christian scripture of God *directly* messing with people's minds ("He made him believe he was a giant rabbit"). Instead, you as a created being are put in a world you need to make sense of, and have to take it from there.
So the devil has to work indirectly, as it were: his goal is to make people *chose* to fall away from God. Cursing them might help, but usually won't: he has to take a more indirect route most of the time. So in this regard, the Malleus Maleficarum makes perfect sense.
Nah, making sense of the world is decidedly not an important part of the Christian worldview, that's the heresy of the Enlightenment, which itself is a manifestation of the sin of Pride. The world is God's creation, inheriting from Him the qualities of being mysterious and unfathomable, and people are hopelessly lost in it without divine guidance, which is in part facilitated by the Church. The Devil is free to to lie and inflict illusions in order to subvert free will, before which you are helpless without God's protection.
Attempting to study the world isn't exactly misguided, but only to the extent that this would fill the relatively unimportant gaps in the Biblical picture, with which definitely no contradictions may be discovered even in principle.
"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.
"Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.
"If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?
"Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion."
-- St. Augustine of Hippo, De genesi ad literam.
In case that needs glossing: Augustine is writing to his fellow Christians, and saying don't be caught saying something ignorant about the natural world, and especially don't make it worse by trying to defend your error by quoting Scripture inappropriately.
This is false under most versions of Christian theology. (If anything, it's a better description of medieval Islamic views.)
In general, Christians held that the world was knowable and lawful, and discovering those laws was a way to honor God. Theology was proclaimed "queen of the sciences"; this implies the existence, and good standing, of other sciences to be queen of.
>there are no examples either in Jewish or Christian scripture of God *directly* messing with people's minds
Nebuchadnezzar?
Ah, the eating grass bit? It seems to be interpreted as a punishment for the king's pride (and tyranny over the peoples), and that he forgets, even having been told, that all his power ultimately comes from God. The curse/punishment is triggered when the king makes a boast about how he created this great kingdom (all by himself, out of his own power):
"24 “This is the interpretation, Your Majesty, and this is the decree the Most High has issued against my lord the king: 25 You will be driven away from people and will live with the wild animals; you will eat grass like the ox and be drenched with the dew of heaven. Seven times will pass by for you until you acknowledge that the Most High is sovereign over all kingdoms on earth and gives them to anyone he wishes. 26 The command to leave the stump of the tree with its roots means that your kingdom will be restored to you when you acknowledge that Heaven rules. 27 Therefore, Your Majesty, be pleased to accept my advice: Renounce your sins by doing what is right, and your wickedness by being kind to the oppressed. It may be that then your prosperity will continue.”
After the seven years were up, his sanity was restored and so was his kingship:
"37 Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and exalt and glorify the King of heaven, because everything he does is right and all his ways are just. And those who walk in pride he is able to humble."
This reminds me of the Irish tale of Mad Sweeney, who likewise is cursed to animal-form by a saint for offending him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buile_Shuibhne
"I omitted most of the many, many times when Kramer follows his claims with stories of the cases that led him to believe them (...) Everything is like this. Rare is the unsourced claim."
Reminds me of the vast majority of published business books. Case studies and anecdotes galore, always reinforcing the author's particular point-of-view.
Don't forget the convenient studies. (which fails to replicate and\or is contradicted in 3 different ways by more studies)
The part about the witch covens conferring with the Devil in a man's body reminded me of the Decameron story of the guy getting hired at the nunnery to have sex with the nuns. There's got to be at least one story of a coven making carnal deals with some guy pretending to be the Devil, only for the actual Devil to show up five minutes later with a "sorry I'm late, I had to stop to pick my kid up from school" and a very awkward time for all involved.
I feel like this whole article has a very weird tone for the topic, which is the torture and murder of thousands of people, and is not just confined to the past but is still happening in Africa today ...
Your idea that Kramer was just an ordinary, well-intentioned guy trying his best to understand the world seems to be undermined by his Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Kramer. He seems to have been regarded negatively by lots of his peers. Disclaimer: I know nothing myself about this topic
The wikipedia entry suggests that *some* of his peers were disapproving, but the guy was appointed as a papal nuncio and given standing ovations by others. Probably not a massive outlier for the time.
To be specific, the entry says that Kramer seems to have written the book as a self-justification after being expelled from Innsbruck by the Bishop who disapproved of his methods. It mentions that he had a fixation on the sexuality of one of the accused.
It also says 'Kramer failed in his attempt to obtain endorsement for this work from the top theologians of the Inquisition at the Faculty of Cologne, and they condemned the book as recommending unethical and illegal procedures, as well as being inconsistent to what they perceived as the orthodox Catholic doctrines of demonology'
Yes he was received well elsewhere. But maybe Scott is being too quick in adopting the idea that this was a good, well-motivated person. Some of the details in his biography seem to suggest otherwise.
Again, I am a total newcomer on this topic, just to clarify.
I'd really like to see a SSC (or reader) book review of Graham Hancock's supernatural. Yes, he's a "Atlantean chamber of records in a cavity under the Sphinx" kind of guy, as well as a book on "what if there were a TECHNOLOGICAL explanation for the supposed magical powers of the Ark of the Covenant (and where the hell is it hidden, anyway)?"
Supernatural is everything from cave art to alien abductions. One of the book's theories is that a key step on the path to evolutionary modern humans was discovering altered states of consciousness - sometimes through rituals, sometimes through mushrooms, and according to the book, there have always been a small number of humans who could spontaneously (and often involuntarily) enter altered states of consciousness. Some cultures created the role of shaman for them, and they were able to contribute to human civilisation (the stone-age version of the social model of disability?) whereas we diagnose them as mentally ill.
Point is, a lot of their experiences sound a lot like magic, witchcraft and wizardry - their actual visions are of course socially mediated, so cavemen would experience some kind of supernatural bison hunt, nowadays it's aliens, but in the middle ages it could have well taken the form of consorting with devils. There's lots and lots of experiencing being pierced with spears and having your body cut open in a trance state (I presume penis-stealing comes into this somewhere). And of course someone randomly being struck down by trance states would look a lot like they'd been cursed or bewitched.
In the middle ages in particular, the ergot fungus that grows on rye fields seems to have been a big problem, it not only caused physical poisoning symptoms but also had psychoactive effects "simliar to LSD" in malnourished people in particular (the book goes into some detail on this). The wikipedia page on ergotism even speculates about a connection to the Salem witch trials.
I searched thru the comments here and found not one reference to rye, ergot, hallucinations, and witches. CORRECTION: Spruce's comment above just appeared 3 minutes ago, so updating.
But here is link to a study that purports to document witchcraft "activities" with outbreaks of rye ergot:
https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1037.htm#:~:text=In%201976%20Linnda%20Caporael%20offered,followed%20by%20a%20wet%20spring.
The impious and sceptical tone of this review makes me suspect the author of being involved in either witchcraft or bolshevism.
>All suspected witches have the right to an attorney. But if the attorney goes overboard defending the client, it is reasonable to suspect him of being a witch himself.
That sounds awfully familiar even today. There are too many people even today rejecting that defendants have rights, no matter how severe the accusations.
That's because it's a pretty unintuitive idea that having an attorney procure exoneration for a client that he knows is guilty is a Good Thing for society. I doubt that the average person would agree.
An attorney's role isn't to exonerate clients they know to be guilty, it's to try and exonerate clients they suspect MIGHT be guilty, because in reality there's a good chance those suspicions are wrong (especially if the evidence is, in fact, weak enough for them to be exonerated.)
(Well, guilt isn't a binary thing, so even a client who is unambiguously guilty of *something* isn't necessarily deserving of the harshest possible punishment - again, even if the attorney suspects they are a complete piece of shit and deserve whatever's coming to them, such suspicions are in fact frequently wrong.)
‘Caliban and the witch’ by Silvia Federici is another interesting attempt to explain why witch-hunting became such a big thing. She takes a kinda Marxist-feminist approach. Basically, with the transition from feudalism to capitalism it was advantageous for the nobility to try a divide-and-rule approach towards the proles. Conflict between the sexes rather than class war. Then the population shortage after the Plague added an extra incentive to subjugate women. End result: witch-hunt.
Don’t know how accurate it is. She does seem to think that feudalism was kinda like a communalistic utopia. But I think she’s right in highlighting the link between witches and reproduction - see the mention of miscarriages and infanticide in Scott’s review.
It’s definitely an entertaining read. Complete with illustrations of the penis-birdnest!
Echoes of today.
If you're nuts enough, you can read Dutton's Witches, Feminism, and the Decline of the West. He argues that feminism and witchcraft are attempts by genetically unfit spiteful mutants to diminish reproduction.
Man, a lot of wasted bandwidth.
Timely, considering that Russia is now saying that the big threat from Ukraine is Satanism. I guess Nazism wasn't scary enough.
That moment has long passed already.
It was Nazism agains Russians, which didn't inspire quite enough righteous anger among conscripted Muslim ethnic minorities.
Well, Ukraine did threaten to steal the penises from the Russian troops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaxaSd0o6_w&t=355s
Russian comedians actually spoofed J.K. Rowling into an interview where they told her Ukrainian witches were casting spells to make Russia fail.
https://www.indiewire.com/2022/06/jk-rowling-zelensky-zoom-prank-1234736305/#!
The video's been taken down, but if you google you can probably find it.
(I don't support Putin but I still found this amusing.)
Witch alarmism sounds quite a lot like AI alarmism.
I have to admit, I had the same thought: "some power greater than human is looming as a threat and we have to take action to stop it now, or else! how do we know? well we can't know, but we must act anyway!"
Except that one thing exists and the other doesn't.
? Witches never existed.
I have a friend who is in her 70s, whose family was heavily into witchcraft when she was a child. The way she describes it is pretty much a type of child abuse, but apparently her mom actually believed she was able to cast some kinds of spells. With the caveat that these events happened 60+ years before I knew the the people involved, I think the mom was a mixture of superstitious and mentally unbalanced. Superstitions used to be really common - my parents knew people in very rural Kentucky that believed some weird stuff, like if you get slapped in the back while pregnant your kid will look like the face you were making.
For the family I was talking about above, the kids distanced themselves from their mom about as soon as they were able and rejected anything to do with her, but are still really freaked out by anything like it to this day. I'm not sure if they do or do not believe that witchcraft is (potentially) real.
1. The Romans also thought witches existed, but because they came at it from another perspective, they were opposed merely to *bad* uses of witchcraft.
2. Even C. S. Lewis thought the only reason we shouldn't burn witches is because they don't exist. If they did, we should.
1. The distinction between religion and magic is due to Abrahamic religions. Saints preform miracles through the power of God, whereas witches invoke Satan.
2. And how could he be certain?
Presumably if it met the standard of evidence we use for other methods of murder, assault, property crimes, etc.
(Interesting question if in the US we’d require the evidentiary standard for treason to specifically punish the part where it’s done to advance the interests of a hostile foreign power.)
Though I’m pretty sure the current consensus, and that in England during Lewis’s lifetime, is still against burning for any crime, however heinous.
As I recall, Lewis said that we don't *execute* witches because we don't believe they exist. He didn't mention burning specifically, so I assume he was thinking of hanging, which was the usual form of execution in England during his time.
> Even C. S. Lewis thought the only reason we shouldn't burn witches is because they don't exist. If they did, we should.
Now the only question is who came up with the stupid idea that witches exist and need to be killed. Oh wait, https://biblehub.com/exodus/22-18.htm
In other words, C.S.Lewis says that you should not blame the religion for doing what the Bible says. Hey, if you believed in the Bible and obeyed it, you would be a horrible person too!
I wonder what Inquisition did to people who gently pointed out that perhaps their holy book is full of shit and witches actually do not exist.
Typo
> that hundreds of people telling you telling stories
I can’t reconcile this with the advice Scott shared a few weeks ago from a Christian sub stack saying that the devil compels your worship while God merely invites it. Seems like the conception of the devil in this book is very consent-oriented, getting verbal confirmation of worship intent and also taking measures to make sure worshippers are satisfied and compensated. So when did the view switch to the Devil compelling worship?
The "God merely invites" bit is hilarious given that the guy (?) literally threatens you with forms of tortue beyond your comprehension if you don't play ball. Like, I can almost imagine God a she\her progressive saying "Freedom of Speech doesn't mean Freedom from Consequences".
>very consent-oriented, getting verbal confirmation of worship intent and also taking measures to make sure worshippers are satisfied and compensated
But that's just the start of the employment, right ? The devil is a seducer. Every seduction begins sweetly, the consent theater is pointless (just like in real life) because the actual compelling was done long ago, in the form of manipulating the person into circumstances where the act is the only reasonable choice. A.K.A., "is working my job really my own free will if I will starve without it ?"
The Devil requiring consent has to do with Catholic theology about free will. You can't be tricked or stumble into sin, for it to be truly serious and soul-damning, you have to know what you are doing and agree to it.
This ties in with all the stories about lawyers defeating the Devil (e.g. the Devil and Daniel Webster) due to this kind of 'bound by the terms of the contract' reasoning.
So do modern Catholics reject the idea that the Devil compels worship of him?
You know, I am not up on my theology of the devil as it is currently held, so I can't answer that one. I don't know what the original quote was, or what variety of Christian Substack that was - I'm presuming it was some denomination of Protestant.
I think the idea is that the Devil wishes to redirect the rightful worship of God away from God and towards himself, if possible, but certainly anyway getting the human to abandon God and put some other 'god' in His place (whether that be worship of sex, worldly success, money, power, whatever). The Devil does not care about free will, but being less powerful and only a created being himself, he has to work within the limitations God puts on temptations, such as we see in the book of Job.
I appreciate the information, I’m very ignorant of these things. The quote was: “God wants your worship to be freely given, the Antichrist wants to compel it” and it is from Scott’s summary of “Tipping Point Prophecy Update” substack that he describes as evangelical. I was just caught by how much that description of the antichrist differs from the pop culture deal-with-the-devil and then saw in this post that that isn’t so much pop culture as old school inquisition belief. Though I guess I was conflating the Antichrist with Satan. Which raises the further question of whether the Antichrist is Satan?? This rabbit hole is too deep for me.
Compels by some kind of irresistible force or mind control? Yes, they'd generally reject that.
"""Compels""" by temptation and corruption, perhaps, getting people twisted into "slaves to sin" against their natural desire to do and be good.
I lived in a Midwestern community from 1978-1999. I saw "normal" church goers become fundamental and join strange (to me) churches. I was actually fearful to let my kids buy and play Dungeons and Dragons. This is absolutely the beginning of what is happening now. His reference to "Satanic Panic" (in blue) is worth a read as well. These people were in a bible study group with me, and were very "normal" they changed so much in a couple of years that I couldn't be friends with them anymore. My way of coping was going back to college and majoring in Physics and Mathematics. lol
>what else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colors! Therefore if it be a sin to divorce her when she ought to be kept, it is indeed a necessary torture, for either we commit adultery by divorcing her, or we must endure daily strife.
Damn. And to think that this guy is ***checks google*** called Golden Mouth, what kind of garbage sewer mouth would spew all this hatred on our sweet partners in humanity.
Someone else in this thread said that the quote in question is heavily fabricated by the Malleus:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-malleus-maleficarum/comment/10042272
Now this is the kind of content for which I subscribe!
Regarding Montague Summers, he was one of those eccentrics that a previous comment thread was asking about. Richard Feynman frequented strip clubs? Penny-ante stuff. Did Feynman write about demons, witches, vampires and werewolves, being regarded as a respectable authority on same?
Did Feynman have a hairstyle like this?
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61hjkct8BkL.jpg
Summers was allegedly a clergyman, but there's some doubt as to whether he ever was really a priest. He had been ordained an Anglican deacon, but then he converted to Catholicism, and went about saying he was a priest but there's no records (so far as I know) that he ever officially was one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montague_Summers
There's a lot of fascinating stuff about late Victorian/Edwardian Englishmen who converted to Catholicism then went off the deep end (or were already off the deep end), such as the self-styled Baron Corvo, one Frederick Rolfe. Especially his novel "Hadrian the Seventh" which contains an authorial self-insert who becomes pope (and it is very gay, as was Rolfe himself, but that romantic, sentimental, mawkish gayness of a certain strain of English writing).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadrian_the_Seventh
There's also Robert Hugh Benson, scion of an Anglican clerical family, who converted, was ordained, and is also well-known for his ghost/horror/supernatural fiction. He had two brothers who were also writers, A.C. Benson and the better known E.F. Benson.
Regarding the accounts of penis-stealing, that's koro. Today we send people to psychiatrists, not inquisitors, to get it fixed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koro_(medicine)
And to sum up, the "Hexenhammer" is an example of why Pope Leo didn't take Martin Luther seriously. Some German friar is having freakouts over the Epistles of St. Paul? Yeah, well, the Germans are like that, everybody knows. Kramer himself got into trouble for his obsession with witches:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Scheuberin
"Helena Scheuberin was an Austrian woman who stood trial accused of witchcraft in 1485. Her trial and acquittal led Heinrich Kramer to write Malleus Maleficarum, which was published two years later.
…The defendants' lawyer raised procedural objections, which the commissary general, representing Bishop Golser, upheld. The accused were released after putting up a bond to appear should the case be resumed. In the end, Helena Scheuberin and the other six women were all either freed or received mild sentences in the form of penance.
The trials were overseen in part by inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, who traveled to Germany to investigate witches. The local diocese refused to honor his jurisdiction, leading Kramer to seek and receive the papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus (1484) which reaffirmed his jurisdiction and authority as an inquisitor.
Kramer was dissatisfied with the outcome of the trials and stayed in Innsbruck to continue his investigations. Exchanged letters show Bishop of Brixen Georg Golser, whose diocese contained Innsbruck, commanding Kramer to leave the city. He eventually left after the Bishop expelled Kramer for insanity and his obsession towards Helena. He returned to Cologne and wrote a treatise on witchcraft that became the Malleus Maleficarum (first published 1487), an instruction guide for identifying witches."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum
"In 1484 clergyman Heinrich Kramer made one of the first attempts at prosecuting alleged witches in the Tyrol region. It was not a success: he was expelled from the city of Innsbruck and dismissed by the local bishop as "senile and crazy".
Some scholars have suggested that following the failed efforts in Tyrol, Kramer requested explicit authority from the Pope to prosecute witchcraft. Kramer received a papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus in 1484. It gave full papal approval for the Inquisition to prosecute what was deemed to be witchcraft in general and also gave individual authorizations to Kramer and Dominican Friar Jacob Sprenger specifically. Other scholars have disputed the idea that Sprenger was working with Kramer, arguing that the evidence shows that Sprenger was actually a persistent opponent of Kramer, even going so far as to ban him from Dominican convents within Sprenger's jurisdiction while also banning him from preaching.
...The preface also includes an alleged unanimous approbation from the University of Cologne's Faculty of Theology. Nevertheless, many historians have argued that it is well established by sources outside the Malleus that the university's theology faculty condemned the book for unethical procedures and for contradicting Catholic theology on a number of important points: "just for good measure Institoris {Kramer's Latinised pen name] forged a document granting their apparently unanimous approbation."
The book became the handbook for secular courts throughout Renaissance Europe, but was not used by the Inquisition, which "denied any authority to the Malleus"
So he wasn't above implying he had more official authority and backing than he did, and indeed forging documents:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summis_desiderantes_affectibus
"The bull was written in response to the request of Dominican Inquisitor Heinrich Kramer for explicit authority to prosecute witchcraft in Germany, after he was refused assistance by the local ecclesiastical authorities, who maintained that as the letter of deputation did not specifically mention where the inquisitors may operate, they could not legally exercise their functions in their areas. The bull sought to remedy this jurisdictional dispute by specifically identifying the dioceses of Mainz, Köln, Trier, Salzburg, and Bremen.
The bull urged local authorities to cooperate with the inquisitors and threatened those who impeded their work with excommunication. Despite this threat, the bull failed to ensure that Kramer obtained the support he had hoped for, causing him to retire and to compile his views on witchcraft into his book Malleus Maleficarum, which was published in 1487. The Malleus professed, in part fraudulently, to have been approved by the University of Cologne, and it was sensational in the stigma it attached to witchcraft as a worse crime than heresy and in its notable animus against women.
...Summis desiderantes affectibus was published as part of the preface of the book, implying papal approval for the work. However, the Malleus Maleficarum received an official condemnation by the Church three years later, and Kramer's claims of approval are seen by modern scholars as misleading."
So why the witchcraft craze? And why places like Germany falling for it wholesale, while other regions didn't? That is a good question to ask. Why do people fall for conspiracy theories today?
> And I don’t want to completely rule out that some people actually tried witchcraft... The history of modern occultism implies that any sufficiently schizo-spectrum person who asks to see the Devil will come away satisfied..
There is another possibility, that Wicha was actually a "movement" back then, either remnants of paganism, or a fad like hipiedom. It wasn't rogue schizophrenics, it was a group of people.
This piece is a great illustration of why I can’t get comfortable with Scott or the rationalist community generally. The post is genuinely interesting, informative, provocative, and even admirably self-aware, but it can’t bring itself to follow through on its own logic when that logic threatens the self-image of rationalism as a based thinking person’s alternative to cringe academic progressivism.
I think Scott is commendably perceptive to see himself in Kramer, a clever man willing to fearlessly entertain the mind-boggling consequences of actually taking commonplace beliefs seriously, and to be afraid of this similarity. But he pulls his punch before getting to the big payoff: thinking independently and writing contrarian books about bold world-changing ideas is *dangerous*, the normal standards of intellectual hygiene that so impress Scott are not enough, and a responsible critical thinker must go further by including marginalized perspectives that don’t make it into the “respectable” hegemonic discourse.
The problem comes in framing Kramer’s received hegemonic worldview of upper-class literate Europeans as the only one reasonably available to him. This overlooks not only his peers’ many contemporary responses that called out his problematic, prejudiced, and unfair project, but the fact that the “witches” themselves had plenty of critiques!
So my takeaway is not that, alas, even with the best of intentions, a well-meaning rationalist can accidentally do a whoopsie and set off a few centuries of torturing innocent people to death. It’s that “merely” trying to make sense of common beliefs and taking them to their logical conclusions (according to hegemonic logic), without carefully accounting for the viewpoints being excluded from these deliberations, is a deadly epistemic sin that can lead smart people to do evil things. The lesson of Malleus Maleficarum for rationalists is that they actually need to be reading cringe academics writing about things like “epistemic injustice”, “antiblackness”, and “patriarchal systems of knowledge production”, or else they might become the scary monsters.
(The reason I keep reading the blog is that clearly Scott is smart and self-critical enough to have considered this, so maybe he’s trying to tee up this conclusion for us in an indirect way that avoids his losing ingroup status among other anti-feminist rationalists. But alas, he just disavowed Straussian hermeneutics in the last post…)
Oh no, there are no BIPOC commenters leaving their opinions of this post! Whatever shall we do?
I realise that sounds flippant, but I do not worry about "Is somebody in Angola excluded from reading this blog because they feel it is an unsafe space?", largely because I think most of the people in Angola have more pressing concerns and who knows but what the native Angolan rationalist scene is thriving and they have their own bloggers and commentariat and don't feel the need to be reading American websites?
"Will nobody think of the children?" appeals don't tend to go down well.
Right now, on our national classical music station, they've been running Black History Month broadcasts all the week. And you know what? It's all about African-American history (black female composers, for instance).
And you know why that is? Because we don't have native black people to have a history of being black in Ireland, not in sufficient numbers to date. We're getting a lot more black and Asian and other immigrants, and in ten or twenty years time we might have enough stories of our own that such an event would be meaningful. Meanwhile, as I said, we don't even have the "Afro-Caribbean/Black British" experience of next door, so the nice progressively-minded people who want to be sensitive and aware and representative have to wholesale import the entire notion and content from the USA.
So can you understand why I am less than gruntled with pious platitudes about "this is why People Of Colour don't comment on here"?
There may or may not be such genetically-based differences. I think that a lot of discussion around it is useless, either pro- or anti-, because we just don't have reliable data yet. The kind of "IQ tests prove Africans have a mean IQ of 90" stuff is not good but neither is the "the reason Jamal isn't going to Harvard to be a doctor is because of systemic racism, not because he skipped 90% of school and prefers to be a drug dealer" stuff.
Take the vexed question of "women in STEM". Is there a role for sexism being a discriminatory force there? Yes. But there also appears to be a legitimate difference in the spectrum of mathematical ability/intelligence between men and women, where you get more men on the extremes of "idiots/geniuses" while most women cluster around the middle.
So if you want mathematically gifted people in STEM, you are more likely to have more male candidates than female, because there are going to be more guys on the "genius" side of the distribution than women, even if we did away with sexism etc. in the morning.
Maybe there is a similar result for African-American population; less at the extremes, clustered around the middle, so as a natural distribution there are going to be fewer African-Americans on the "genius" side. Not *none*, just *fewer* so "why are there not as many African-American Nobel prize winners?" is *not* down to systemic racism or whatever.
I don't know. And I submit, neither do you.
So now I'm a scientific racist for saying we don't have sufficiently good data about global populations to make any pronouncements one way or the other about 'X race or sub-population smarter/stupider than Y race or sub-population'.
Maybe we can say "Asians somewhat smarter than whites in some fields"? Is that racist or scientific or both?
Yes, African-American non-readers of ACX, I think that you are all stupid and violent criminals. Naturally that is the conclusion to be drawn from "maybe some of the alleged IQ gap is down to that particular sub-population, due to a combination of historical environmental factors, clustering around median intelligence and not being long-tailed on both idiocy and genius". How nice to know that unless I am willing to blindly declare "Every single one of the African-American population, without exception, is a blazing genius and the only reason they are not all replacing whites in Ivy League universities, top hospitals, NASA and the likes is systemic racism, because it cannot be that even one single African-American may just be average intelligence" then I am a racist. I wouldn't even say that about my own countrymen, but then again, you can't be racist to whites, correct?
More shocking and startling revelations: I do think that fewer women are interested in/capable of high level maths than men, which explains a lot of the gap about "why not enough women in STEM". Is that scientific sexism, or must I do public declaration of "of *course* the answer is always and only sexism, not girls have different interests which they pursue"?
I guess that's why I'm in denial of the likes of this woman in STEM:
https://www.ucc.ie/en/sefs/news/2022/physics-graduate-professor-margaret-murnane-wins-isaac-newton-medal-and-prize.html
Curious what makes you confident few commenters here are people of color. Are you making assumptions about a connection between people's skin color and the style and content of their writing?
I am one of those people - at least, while I do not consider it to be proven, and do not have the mathematical ability to deeply grok such things as principal component analysis and other advanced statistical tools, I do at least have something of an informed lay person's understanding, and I am prepared to take at face value the consensus of the intelligence research community - that is; a strong consensus that IQ tests measure something real and important, strong consensus that the differences between racial group averages measured by IQ tests reflect real differences in average cognitive ability and are not just artefacts of test bias, and a weak consensus that genetic differences probably underlie some, but not all, of those differences in average cognitive ability, albeit with really no consensus at all as to what percentage (other than 'not 0% and not 100%') of the average differences are accounted for by genetics and what percentage by non-genetic factors. Scott himself is on record as being at least concerned that these claims *could* be true, but that he really doesn't like talking about it because of the backlash he gets from egalitarian ideologues, so I don't think it's fair of you to demand that he disavow these claims until you have at least done the work and shown that they could not possibly be true.
Also, what *exactly* is racist about The Bell Curve?
Thinking there are zero genetic differences in average intelligence between the races seems either amazingly naive or the result of ideologically-induced logic dysfunction. I mean, 80% of the NBA is black, and a non-black man hasn't won the gold medal in the Olympic 100m since 1980. Normal people look at that and say, well yeah, black people are just on average genetically better sprinters and jumpers. Yellow people consistently gain entrance to the most intellectually demanding of schools and professions at rates much higher than their representation in the population. Normal people look at that and say, well yeah yellow people are just on average genetically smarter.
Saying that only in one particular area of human ability and only for one particular race comparison there are no genetic differences at all is logically incoherent. I don't see how someone could hold that position without suffering from an ideological compromise of his rational faculties.
The rational man's response to the whole observation is to say: so what? That there are modest differences in the genetic component of abilities beween the races does not have any obvious and useful implications for the structure of society. We already know people vary tremendously in abilities, both physical and intellectual (and the variation between individuals dwarfs that between races), and we need a society that accommodates that spectrum. Criminals are mostly dumb, so we need a judicial system that copes with that. We need to siphon off the smart people to be doctors and physicists. We would like to siphon off the athletically gifted to entertain us on the TV. Maybe lesbians are inherently wittier, so we'd like to siphon them off to improve stand-up comedy. It's clearly a good idea to siphon off the physically enduring and mentally resilient to populate our armed forces.
That more white or black or yellow or red or purple people might end up in any given category than is accounted for by pure chance seems a mere philosophical observation, with little practical effect and even less interest, unless you're obsessed with this stuff for some strange personal reason, or via paranoia think it's always evidence of some vast conspiracy.
Only an intellectual could seriously argue that skin color "corresponds fairly poorly to genetic differences." You suppose some people just self-identify as black or white, and that changes their melanin concentration? We're just seeing how much time they spent in the sun as a kid? I'm normally not that impressed by the extent to which people will bend themselves into logical pretzels to avoid inconvenient obvious fact, since it's commonplace, but this is still something.
Anyway, the rest of what you've said is a farrago of handwaving and non-sequiturs. None of it addreses in the slightest my point, which is that accepting that there are differences in, say, athletic ability that stem from genetic distinctions and then turning around and doubting that such a thing is possible at all in intellectual ability is logically self-contradictory.
I'd be shocked if any normal black people think their overrepresentation in elite track and field and the NBA has no basis at all in genetic advantage. Can you name such a person? There ought to be tons, if you are correct.
I'd also like to see an example of "many" people moving quickly from "there are genetic differnces" to "white supremacy is true" to believe this isn't just a figment of your imagination. I've personally never come across such a person, and I've been around since midway through the previous century. Maybe you have a lot more experience of people, or maybe you hang out with an unusually thick-headed crowd.
Or maybe this conclusion is a product of your imagination and ideology. Maybe you're sure white supremacists are everywhere the way Kramer was sure witches were everywhere, and maybe you feel a need for us to be vigilant about them the way Kramer thought we should be worried about witches in our midst.
I see what you mean, @ ±Z—I was expecting "who are you to speak for the blacks?", not "yes, ACX is hostile to racial minorities, and this is fine because of an unrelated racial grievance I have".
While that is certainly an impolite way of phrasing it, and presumably fails both the 'kind' and 'necessary' hurdles of the Victorian Buddha Sufi Lite comment policy, the idea that there *are* people of Sub-Saharan African ancestry who are sufficiently impulsive as to be unable to resist the temptation to riot when the opportunity arises is certainly true, and the idea that they comprise a larger proportion of the black population than the riot-prone fractions of other racial groups is at least plausible on current evidence.
Yes, I suppose it does count as "racial grievance" that in order to keep up with the Joneses, we must import American obsessions such as Black History Month (will we be celebrating November as Native American Heritage Month, too? I'd have more sympathy with that one) and since we don't have any actual black history of our own to talk about, we need to import the American version as well.
If Integer will go out, find some unrepresented BIPOC folx and ask them do they give a damn about whether or not there are sufficient numbers of non-white people reading this blog, then I'll be more impressed than more pointless virtue signalling. I could presume that Integer is a white guy, but if he/she/they are not, then great. They can be our Token BIPOC Leftist Progressive, ain't that nice?
Now, if there are any real BIPOC readers/commenters here, please feel free to have a go at me. That at least is more honest than mutterings about "The commentariat here is hostile to People Of Colour, but not me, *I'm* one of the Good Ones".
Hey, I note below that January and August are free, maybe Integer can get one of these rebranded as "ACX People Of Colour Reparations For Not Doing Enough To Have You Comment On Here, Grovelling Apologies Month".
https://edib.harvard.edu/heritage-months
"February: Black History Month
Black History Month began as a way to teach people about the history of Black Americans and their contributions to society, it sought to ensure that these perspectives were included in the national narrative.
Today, Black History Month is a call to inclusion year-round and celebrates more than Black history, but also the ongoing achievements of African Americans in all realms of society.
March: Women's History Month
Celebrate Women's History Month at Harvard from March 1 to March 31, 2021. Women's History Month began as a smaller "Women's History Week" on March 7, 1982, and was later petitioned by the National Women's History Project to become a month-long celebration. The month of March officially became Women's History Month in 1987 and gives us the opportunity to acknowledge the historical contributions of women in the United States. International Women's Day is observed on March 8th. Learn more about Women's History Month.
April: Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Month
National Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Month (SAAM) recognizes the ongoing need to put an end to the crime of sexual assault. April is also a time to acknowledge the resilience of those impacted by sexual assault including survivors and victims, as well as advocates and professionals supporting survivors, and to ensure that our homes, places of learning and work are safe for all.
May: Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Asian Pacific American Heritage Month began in 1977 as a smaller ten day celebration in May, and transformed to a month-long observance in 1990. The month commemorates the resilience and legacy, traditions, and culture of Asians, Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders across the United States.
June: Pride Month
Pride Month was created to commemorate the Stonewall Rebellion which took place on June 28, 1969, considered by historians to be the start of the modern LGBTQ+ movement. The month commemorates the progress of LGBTQ+ history and civil rights, and celebrates queer stories and excellence of the community.
July: Disability Pride Month
The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed by President George H.W. Bush on July 26, 1990, a landmark law that prohibited discrimination against people with disabilities. In that same year, Boston held the first Disability Pride Day.
Although Disability Pride Day isn't nationally recognized, parades are held in a number of places nationwide, such as Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, San Antonio and more. In 2015, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio declared July Disability Pride Month in celebration of the ADA’s 25th anniversary.
The month is a chance to honor each person's uniqueness as "a natural and beautiful part of human diversity," according to America's Disability Community.
September: Latinx Heritage Month
Latinx Heritage Month started as a weeklong celebration in 1968, and has grown to a month from September 15 through October 15 to incorporate the independence days of Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua. The month recognizes the legacies and contributions of individuals who trace their roots to Spain, Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Spanish-speaking nations of the Caribbean.
October: LGBTQ+ History Month
LGBTQ+ History Month honors members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender nonconforming, and queer communities. October was chosen to nationally commemorate LGBTQ+ history, political activism, and contributions because several important dates fall within the month, including National Coming Out Day (October 11), Spirit Day acknowledging LGBTQ+ youth (October 20), Asexual Awareness Week (last week in October), and others.
November: Native American Heritage Month
In November, Native American Heritage Month celebrates the long history of Indigenous people and communities. During this month we acknowledge the rich culture, unique traditions, and ongoing contributions of Native Americans."
In another comment, you asked whether mentioning certain facts about group differences might make blacks feel unwelcome here. Are you suggesting that a policy be instituted requiring lying (by omission if not explicitly) regarding such facts in order to make blacks feel equally welcome to e.g. Ashkenazim? Such a departure from free inquiry would seem to me to be at odds with the stated aims of this community.
>ought this blog to be equally welcoming to people of all races?
I think you are smuggling some strategic equivocation in there with the word 'welcoming'. An analogy: Ought a hip-hop club be equally welcoming of all races? What if the number of East Asians attending your hip-hop club is a tiny fraction of their percentage of the East Asian population of the city the club is in? Well, I don't think that the organizers should have a deliberate policy of excluding people of East Asian ancestry, and I don't think they should tolerate racist mistreatment of the few East Asians who attend at the hands of the presumably majority black patrons, but if East Asians genuinely are on average less musically interested in hip-hop than black people, or are genuinely more squicked out by the subject matter of the lyrics, or by the sexualized nature of the dancing that goes on in your club, then I don't think your club ought to be under any obligation to go out of its way to recruit more clientele from the East Asian population.
Likewise, if this blog has no policy of excluding people of particular racial groups (how could that even be enforced? I don't remember Substack asking me to tick a racial census box when I signed up), and makes reasonable effort to tamp down on people being abusive to others on the basis of race, then if members of some groups are simply less likely to be interested in discussing politics, medicine, AI risk and, yes, intelligence research, then I do not see why Scott should be expected to go out of his way to pander to those groups.
>I'm very sorry you're upset about Black History Month, American obsessions, virtue signaling, the concept of apologizing, the fact that there are too many months, and my failure to go out and interview a bunch of "BIPOC folx" before commenting.
I don't think she's upset about those months being celebrated in the USA, I think she's just annoyed at the American cultural imperialism that expects people in Ireland, where the population of people from many of those categories is negligible, to be as obsessed about celebrating those particular identity groups as Americans are.
I accept your apology in the spirit in which it is offered.
(And that's the last mean thing I am going to say).
Now I am going to disengage from this exchange, and I will explain why because I do owe that much courtesy to anyone with whom I am interacting.
I *want* to continue this fight, because that is what it has become. We are not exchanging information, we are quarrelling. And I have mulled over various responses, but they included insults (and that is what the things I might have said would be, making no bones about it). I *want* to get into a screaming row with you, but that is *not* what this place is about.
(Also, I cannot bear the thought of Scott "I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed").
So I'm going to shut up and walk away right this second, with no counter-accusations, self-justifications, or smart remarks.
I thought you were going in the direction of https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/10/research-credibility-and-group-differences/ until I'd read 70% of your comment. Interesting how perspectives differ on which views and which groups are unfairly marginalized and excluded.
> marginalized perspectives
> “epistemic injustice”, “antiblackness”, and “patriarchal systems of knowledge production”
As a rule of thumb, if something can be read of routinely in the New York Times, it is probably not a "marginalized perspective", and indeed may well be part of that "respectable hegemonic discourse".
I am, of course, in favor of reading and contemplating marginalized perspectives. But if you go looking for perspectives that are actually marginalized, as opposed to feted by the mainstream, you end up in uncomfortable places.
You're making claims about epistemic injustice! (A term which has practically never appeared in the NYT: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Anytimes.com%20%22epistemic%20injustice%22).
I agree that poor, elderly women are better-represented in hegemonic discourse than they were in 1486 (although perhaps still not a group that can put its thoughts into the public conversation as easily as, say, young male Bay Area rationalists); today I'd say that the global poor, nonhuman domestic animals, and children are more obvious examples of groups experiencing/at risk of serious harm because they're not well-represented in decisions that affect them. But we can and should do better than intuition and personal grievance in assessing this social-epistemic landscape.
What Kramer's example shows is that rationalists ought to be very concerned with exactly how "witches" were excluded from the discourses that condemned them, how this form of oppression has waned since then, and whom rationalists might be accidentally harming in similar ways today. There happens to be a school of academic investigation that focuses on these questions, it's called "feminist epistemology", and the thing that bugs me about rationalism is that most of the community reflexively dismisses the field like this without engaging with it beyond the first word.
> how "witches" were excluded from the discourses that condemned them, how this form of oppression has waned since then, and whom rationalists might be accidentally harming in similar ways today
This seems like it applies equally to any time anyone is ever condemned, for everything. If someone has meaningful influence over a given discourse, it seems unlikely that that discourse would condemn them.
Assuming you wish to retain the ability to condemn anything, then, it seems you can't rely too heavily on this meta-level heuristic, and must actually just engage with the object-level question of what is actually good and bad. I am fairly sure, for instance, that the "feminist epistemologists" do condemn things, and that the objects of their condemnation are excluded from the discourse of feminist epistemology.
There are plenty of discourses where people get a fair chance to speak and are then fairly condemned anyway: consider criminal trials with good defense counsel, or the richest 1% being unpopular despite having more than their share of airtime.
Separately, there can be both just and unjust reasons for excluding a perspective from a conversation, regardless of whether you agree with the perspective: “because this decision doesn’t affect you in any way” is legitimate, “because we don’t care what ugly old lower-class women think” is not.
If you agree that harmful and unjust epistemic exclusion sometimes happens (e.g. weird old ladies not getting a fair hearing re: witch-hunting), and you want to base your decisions and projects on rational grounds, you should at least be interested in understanding how these forms of epistemic violence work and whether any might be affecting your knowledge base right now.
I am interested in the question of what perspectives might be missing from mainstream discourse, whether that exclusion is just or unjust, and how it might be affecting the conclusions of that discourse.
It seems to me that calling such an exclusion "epistemic violence", or calling the study of this area "feminist epistemology", amounts to smuggling in premises that should instead be examined critically. In what sense is excluding someone's perspective from a discourse comparable to actually injuring them using physical force? Is unjust exclusion from the discourse actually a phenomenon that solely affects women?
Overall, while it could always be better, it seems to me that the rationalist community does better than average on considering these questions. That makes me suspicious that your complaint is less about epistemics per se, and more about rationalists not acceding to your preferred hidden premises.
Interesting questions indeed! Gender is an fruitful and popular starting place for considering social epistemic exclusion, because there are so many clear-cut examples to dissect, but "feminist" epistemologists certainly don't claim it's the only one; many or most work in dialogue with theorists of other aspects of the social production of knowledge. I'd encourage you to take a look at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-social-epistemology/#EpiInj to see if you think there's anything in there that’s of interest to rationalists who care about these questions (and who are willing to read authors with differing political views).
Also, I fully agree that the rationalist community does "better than average" at considering the social forces that shape their knowledge bases. That's precisely why I find it frustrating that you all don't do quite as well, in my opinion, as academic critical theorists usually do, and why I’m writing out explanations of why I think the community has something to learn from them!
"the global poor, nonhuman domestic animals, and children"
Seems like you're moving the goalposts here.
How so? The point I'm trying to make is that epistemic injustice has affected many groups in many ways across the millennia, and the obvious epistemic injustice against old women illustrated in Malleus Maleficarum should prompt modern rationalists to consider whether other groups are being similarly wronged today.
"nonhuman domestic animals"
Pray tell me more about the human domestic animals. I've read some stuff around fetish sites, so I'm not entirely sure you're not talking about the whole furry/hucows/other weird stuff content.
Unless you mean the humanised rats with brain tissue? That is a good debate to be had about creating chimeras with human brain tissue, and how far we can go with that before they do reach a level of "more human than non-human".
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/10/12/brain-tissue-rats-stanford/
Humans are animals, and we're often considered to have "self-domesticated" in the course of hominid evolution (https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21777). Hence, you and I are human domestic animals.
The Pasca lab's fascinating new protocol doesn't result in any behavioral or cognitive changes in the rats, at least according to the results they chose to publish; if true, this outcome provides strong evidence that human cognition isn't based on any special cell-intrinsic properties, consistent with many prior electrophysiological results. In my opinion, this should update us even further towards thinking that the experiences that make our lives meaningful are fundamentally commensurable with those of other vertebrates, and also allay concerns that human brain organoids have any kind of consciousness above, at most, what you'd expect from an animal with a badly malformed peppercorn-sized brain.
Being a member of a family is not the same thing as being a cow in a herd, so while "nonhuman domestic animal" may be a cute phrase, it's not anything other than trying to give pets the same moral weight and value as humans.
I wouldn't phrase it exactly the same way, but I also felt uneasy through this admittedly hilarious article. Scott empathizes strongly with the guy who apparently had peers acknowledging plausible alternative theories re the prevalence and truth of witch accusations, and which would have resulted in less torture and murder, but chose to ignore them. That's... Very generous, but certainly seems to be throwing weight behind a guy for, who his time, would have been equivalent to rejecting the rationalist school of thought. I am swayed by rationalist arguments, they give me the strength to doubt myself and acknowledge future worlds may laugh at my idiocy. But they also give me the strength to call out intellectual laziness for the harm it does. Dunno why it's given such a pass here. Scott, give yourself credit, you are way better than this guy, and it's ok to say he didn't try hard enough to not advocate for torture and murder of marginalized women.
Happy Halloween!
There's a common pattern of thinking that when others don't agree with your point of view, it's just because they haven't you've read, either because they've never come across the material or have deliberately avoided it.
Scott has indeed addressed many woke claims in the past. And when he did, there was often a chorus of wokists saying "you're OBSESSED with this subject, this is just an unimportant culture war nonsense, blah blah blah."
I dunno. I don't disagree with you on the basic point (you have to really listen to other viewpoints to be sure you're not falling prey to your own individual or cultural blindnesses), but the argument would be a lot more powerful if people writing about "epistemic injustice" and "antiblackness" and "patriarchal systems" were actually excluded and rare minority voices -- instead of, as they actually are, quite loud voices that it's pretty much impossible *not* to hear in contemporary Western culture.
One would also like to see just a tad more of the shoe on the other foot, too, meaning the people writing about systemic racism and the patriarchy taking some clear time to listen to voices unfamliar to *them* who see things differently. That would also make the argument more persuasive as representing "we should all be fairer" as opposed to "my group isn't getting enough attention."
But as I said, I agree on the basic point. I guess I'm just not persuaded this is offered in a genuine spirit of open and even-handed inquiry. Too many negative experiences with people saying similar things, I guess.
A more concise rephrasing of my frustration with ACX could be: while the community prides itself on engaging rationally with ideas on their own terms no matter the source, and indeed does a better job of this than most epistemic communities, there's a general refusal to engage meaningfully with "woke"-coded thinkers (i.e. critical and feminist theorists)—a painfully ironic form of willful ignorance given that, in my experience, the latter group is more genuinely committed to engaging deeply and fairly with ideas they strongly oppose.
I agree with you about rationalist epistemic closure, but I don't think basically everybody wants to be rational. People want to be happy, they want to be rich, they want to get laid, they want children or grandchildren, they want to eat a lot of tasty food without getting fat, they want a hundred other things.
Rationality's kind of a niche taste. Most people are a lot less interested in understanding the truth of the universe than they are in the more common goals evolution would predict.
I think it tends to appeal to people with less pressing concerns (if you're worried about feeding your family you're not going to be worried about rationality) and thus wealthier, who have reached past success using the 'rational' parts of their brain (artists and fashion designers are going to rely more heavily on intuition and so things like this will be less appealing to them), and who are uncomfortable with the current direction of academia (this could be for various reasons but given the extreme left swing of academia this is going to attract a lot of rightists of various stripes)...but also find the macho posturings of far-right figures like Bronze Age Pervert unattractive. (Though I'm sure he has a couple of fans here, and you could definitely mix both approaches.)
Demographically, white (some Asian, plenty of Jewish) males in the right two political quadrants on the compass, particularly bottom right, with STEMish interests.
In short, I think it's just another identity politics...but it's an identity I share, so I support it. Everyone else from BIPOCs to Christian Nationalists is organizing to support their people, why shouldn't we?
I generally have not found the last bit to be the case, but you of course may have different experiences.
I think the thing is a lot of rationalists have had bad experiences with 'woke'-coded thinkers and are coming to blogs like this to get away from that. Also, in a lot of ways 'woke' theory leads to affirmative action, and most rationalists are negatively impacted by that personally.
IMHO it's motivated reasoning all the way down on every side; everyone fights for their tribe, rationality's just the way we lawyer for our group, however we wind up defining that. You count up your identities and you pick a side. If you're cross-pressured, maybe you opt out or pick the one you feel is less offensive.
I appreciate that, and I actually 100% agree that anyone able to publish an academic critical theory book is not a "marginalized voice", certainly not the way 15th-century old German peasant women were marginalized. This is a much-discussed fact/paradox in this literature; it's the main topic of Spivak's famous essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" The conflation of the marginalized with the "pro-marginalized" is all too common on both sides, and there's a great leftist book making the rounds called "Elite Capture", about how many progressive efforts to "center the most marginalized" actually end up centering, like, Ivy League Ph.D.s of color instead of people in refugee camps.
I think the review would have benefited from including actual primary-source perspectives (e.g. court depositions) from witch-hunt victims, but I think it needs to engage with the feminist epistemology literature for a different reason. These theorists have thought very deeply about the failure mode in which low-status people get screwed because high-status Independent Thinkers don't treat their views and knowledge as worthy of serious consideration; this is exactly the failure that led Kramer to think it was a moral imperative to burn innocent people to death en masse, so if I started noticing commonalities between my intellectual project and his, I'd want to check out these people's opinion of where he went wrong.
I would certainly have described myself as a feminist in 1975, but the movement long ago became corrupt and dysfunctional, and now bears no clear connection at all to the advancement of the interests of women in general.
I don't blame anyone born after 1990 who finds "feminist" more the label of a certain stripe of social revolutionary than descriptive of a person committed to the legal equality and equal opportunity of the sexes.
The feminist movement is not a monolith; it's decentralized and full of internal debates between different schools.
It sounds like you agree with the principles of liberal feminism, which holds that the movement should work towards legal and economic sex equality, instead of something more exotic like gender abolition or restructuring the family unit. This is a perfectly respectable position, and it doesn't seem rationally necessary to give up on fighting for these goals just because radical, Marxist, and intersectional feminists also exist and have different priorities.
Very strange comment. Kramer, a man who believes that old ladies with cats and brooms are a great diabolical menace is a rationalist, therefore rationalists should read “patriarchal systems of knowledge production” lest they start a witch-hunt.
Yes, I did not express this very well. As Scott himself recognizes, Kramer is a man engaged in a project that fits with the "rationalist" approach: he's taking a commonly-held belief seriously, and trying to develop a comprehensive logical theory of how all the relevant observations could make sense. He makes an apparently honest effort, but crucially he's fatally flawed by his inability or refusal to give proper respect to the knowledge of marginalized individuals, especially when this knowledge isn't considered worthy of being entered into the "respectable" literature.
For example, midwives could tell him that pregnancy and childbirth are inherently dangerous, and that even with the best perinatal care available in 15th-century Germany babies will sometimes come out stillborn and with gross malformations, and in these cases there's nothing to do except try to dispose of the body ASAP before someone accuses you of witchcraft. But even if anyone dared try to enter this fact into the public record, Kramer would be unduly prejudiced against it, based largely on the social position of the person making the claim (this should be pretty uncontroversial based on what he says about women).
If rationalists want to avoid falling into similar traps, they should be genuinely interested in reading critical analysis about how prevalent this kind of societal epistemic bias is, and how to recognize it. Insofar as rationalists dismiss this literature out of hand because it has the word "patriarchal" in it, I don't trust rationalists to learn from Kramer's example.
Probably late to the party, but Kramer was not what I’d call a decent or reasonable guy. Ask Helena Scheuberin, the woman he tried for witchcraft in Innsbruck. She was acquitted, and then Kramer stalked her. Even in the 15th century, a court ordered him to stop harassing her and the bishop threw him out of the city. And then shortly thereafter he wrote the “Malleus Maleficarum”.
Entertaining rundown at 12 minute mark:
https://youtu.be/4mm0KyaovhY
I love this video for making me realize that witches and werewolves were intertwined more than I realized, and much MUCH further back than I’d thought. Also fascinating: the people who believed they transformed into spectral werewolves to fight witches in their dreams.
The line between religion, magic and what most people considered empirical reality was just drawn differently in the past. One of the best books I’ve ever read was historian Keith Thomas’s seminal treatise “Religion and the Decline of Magic”. The most relevant part to this post might be the background on folk magic. This was *everywhere*, and just pervaded every aspect of life, sometimes so tightly interwoven with official Christianity that it could not be distinguished. But then some significant social, demographic and technological shifts occurred that created a lot more instability and uncertainty. There were suddenly a lot people who just didn’t fit into social structures that had previously provided for just a few oddballs and misfits. Practices that had just been endemic “white magic” suddenly became suspect.
According to family lore, my own great-great-grandmother was a bit of a “Strega”, an Italian folk witch. But what women like her were doing in a chaotic and rapidly depopulating Southern Italy at the end of the 19th century was magic with a distinctly Catholic character. Folk religious practices didn’t get quite the same scouring in Italy and Southern Europe as they did further from the Holy See, almost as if the Church tended to look out past the foot of the Vatican wall. Once arrived in the US, more dogmatic German and Northern European Catholics were largely horrified at all the weird stuff going on in Italian immigrant neighborhoods that called itself Catholicism. Italians quickly dropped a lot of it in the name of both assimilation and modernity.
I knew my ancestors made wax effigies of body parts as offerings to thank the Virgin Mary for healing them, but I was shocked to find you can still do this at the hugely popular Catholic shrine at Fatima in Portugal. If you think the Virgin helped cure your breast cancer, you can buy a wax boob at the gift shop and toss it in a giant oven designated for this purpose. I can only assume that plenty of the millions of Catholics who visit annually find this creepy and weird and not Catholic at all, but it’s countenanced. For now.
Is praying to saints for a sick child over a bowl of holy water and olive oil Christianity or occultism? My ancestors probably didn’t consider that witchcraft at all in 1900, but my mother would have by 1960. If they’d been German instead of Italian a few centuries earlier, they might have been burned for it. Like everything else, it all depends on the incentives of the people around you.
" I can only assume that plenty of the millions of Catholics who visit annually find this creepy and weird and not Catholic at all, but it’s countenanced. For now."
It depends, modern Catholicism (yeah, I'm going to go "post-Vatican II") probably would be deeply embarrassed about the redneck aunties and grannies doing this. I'd go "Huh, odd, but whatever, now I gotta go tie a black cloth on the front door on the eve of St Brigid's Day to use to cure headaches because my grandfather swore by this".
I witch I had known all this earlier!
I think it's no coincidence that the Hammer of Witches came about right after the revolutionary introduction of the printing press. The medieval inquisitions weren't exactly softball but they were much more restrained than the excesses of the early modern period and I think we have to credit the scholastics running the Catholic church for keeping things in bounds and mostly not letting things degenerate in neighbors using the process to settle grudges with each other.
When a new form of media comes along and enables new moral panics, the systems that have grown up to protect people under the old order fall apart.
> promising them worldly prosperity and length of life
McCoy was right all along!
I can't believe nobody has mentioned Béatrice de Planisolles yet
A famous French heretic from a bit earlier in the middle ages. Her Inquisition interview is frankly hilarious ("... the spiciest, juiciest inquisition I have ever had the pleasure to read. She managed to acquired as her lovers most of the top heretics in 14th century southern France, all of whom were listed in the interview, btw, which made it so spicy..") and strongly suggests that, yes, everybody was doing "witchcraft" (as in folk magic) back then.
We made fun of "dormitive potency" not for being false but for being tautological -- it's like saying "poppies can make you sleepy because they have the ability of making people sleepy", just in fancier words.
But do medieval people have any way of discovering opioid receptors?
No, but they could have said "opium makes you sleep for unknown reasons", which would have been more honest and not actually any less informative. See Feynman about triboluminescence, etc.
(anyway, not really "medieval", it's a fictional doctor from a 17th-century comedy)
> It would seem that witches can steal your penis.
As we all know, "penis" can be used as a metaphor for masculinity, and correspondingly also as a metaphor for rationality, e.g. in discussion of how "masculine modes of understanding" forcibly impose and insert themselves on and into the emotional realities of The Other. Therefore, "stealing a penis" can be understood as removing or hindering the victim's ability to be rational, detached, and analytical, and thus by contrast enhancing their emotional volatility. Possibly in general, and possibly on certain specific topics.
> WHICH BY THE WAY MEANS THAT THE F@#KING INQUISITION HAS MORE PRINCIPLES THAN THE NEW YORK TIMES.
Now, I'm not *saying* that a certain NYT writer is a witch, but...
Quasi related twitter thread that went viral last week saying that the theory that witches were pagan wise women persecuted by the catholic church was popularized by Himmler https://twitter.com/suzania/status/1584893372376166405
> there’s a very narrow band between “God restrains the Devil so much that witchcraft can’t exist” and “God restrains the Devil so little that witches have already taken over the world”. Prima facie, we wouldn’t expect the amount God restrains the Devil to fall into this little band.
I read this and I immediately thought of the Anthropic Principle and why it is such an unsatisfying explanation. Indeed, the argument Kramer uses to defend this position kind of looks like the anthropic principle if you squint a bit. If God let the devil kill everyone, then we wouldn't be alive to praise him, so of course God places limits on the devil. Meanwhile, there's evil in the world - we can clearly observe that - therefore we know God allows it.
Compare this to the anthropic principle: If there was no life on the Earth, we wouldn't be around to observe it, so of course we should expect to be on a planet that has life on it - same principle if you want to extend to 'intelligent life'. We don't observe intelligent life elsewhere, indeed we observe that the conditions for its existence (whether at a universal scale or below) are pretty narrow, so we must live in a world/universe in which life can exist.
For me, this explanation has the same lack of convincing power, whether applied to witches/the existence of evil, or to any other attempt at explaining the world as we know it.
The difference as I see it is that life on earth is indeed possible, we only invoke the anthropic principle because it's unlikely. Witchcraft (at least, with our knowledge of the world) is impossible, so anthropic principle logic does not apply.
ModernObserver: Witchcraft is impossible, so therefore your arguments about how God must be assumed to allow it are bunk.
Kramer: My book is well-sourced with clear examples of witchcraft, confessions of witches, etc. I have a lot of strong evidence that witchcraft exists.
ModernObserver: But we took the last half-millennium to prove that you're actually misinterpreting all that evidence! We can now explain everything without resorting to witchcraft or to the kind or argument you're making.
Kramer: And what argument are you currently using to explain the nature of existence as you observe it?
ModernObserver: The anthropic principle. [Explains the principle.] Sure it sounds similar to what you put forward, but the difference is that we know the observations it's based on are solid. (No intelligent life elsewhere, the conditions for existence reside within a narrow band that is otherwise unexplained through some forcing principle.) Therefore it's not a problem to invoke the anthropic principle. This is different from how your explanations for why God allows witchcraft were pure Tomfoolery.
Kramer: Let's come back to this in another five hundred years, shall we?
More seriously, I think the observations the anthropic principle are based on are at least as tenuous as the ones witchcraft was based on. Perhaps more so.
There's this thing that's unexplained: the universe appears fine-tuned. That's weird, because the exact numbers seem arbitrary, but the question of why universal constants are what they are is kind of metaphysical.
There's this rush to explain it: God did it. See, THIS is where we can finally observe His hand directly at work!
There's a reaction: no, it's still random.
How?
Well, there's an infinite number of universes out there, which allows us to hypothesize that randomness eventually produces a universe where life exists. AP explains that we're only observing it in a universe where life is possible.
A much better response would be to say that we don't yet understand how our observations could have arisen naturally. That doesn't mean we'll never understand it, nor does it mean we must admit we've observed the hand of God at work here. Indeed, no positive evidence in favor of the direct action of God has been put forward at this point.
We have an open question. Why fill the void with sophistry instead of waiting for more evidence? Arguments along the line of the infinite universes/AP potentially blind us to a legitimate search for a forcing mechanism that might explain our observations at some future point. The principle of universal gravitation eventually helped explain the formation of stars and galaxies without requiring the direct hand of God in every act of celestial creation. There's likely some principle explaining the formation of matter in the universe, a principle we've not identified yet. Claiming "it's all random" is as bad, IMO, as claiming "God did it directly" in disincentivizing the scientific search for understanding. Both come with no proof, and (in the case of AP) are supported by surprisingly similar philosophical arguments.
The anthropic principle doesn't apply to things that we merely clearly observe. It only applies to things whose negation would be impossible to observe. And even then, it only explains why we observe the universe set up a certain way and our position in it - effects do still have causes within the universe.
Strictly-speaking, the anthropic principle can't be invoked to explain the existence of life on Earth, but merely explains the existence of *intelligence* on Earth - you can theoretically have an intelligence that is not biologically alive. You have to get the rest of the way with other arguments (e.g. "the self-organising nature of life is the easiest way to make an intelligence without another intelligence designing it").
I'll agree with the minor correction that the anthropic principle technically only applies to intelligent life, but I still don't see how AP can be invoked to 'explain' anything. The supposed explanatory assertion of AP is my biggest beef with the idea. It is as useless at explaining intelligence as invoking God is to explain the at-that-time apparent observation of the existence of witchcraft.
(Would that some intrepid philosopher had rejected the anthropic principle of witchcraft - theopic principle? - and dug deeper to explain all those 'witchcraft' observations through some other principle.)
It's the same whether applied to witches or intelligence. It explains AWAY an observation that is otherwise inconvenient for current theory, more than providing the kind of testable explanation we normally like to build scientific theories on. I'm not saying that untestable explanations of observational evidence can never be *correct*. I'm saying they should be suspect insofar as they explain away inconvenient observations. Especially since so many scientific discoveries have been made by digging at observations that are insufficiently explained by current theory. We dismiss observational evidence through clever hand-waving at our peril.
Hi -- saw your result on the ACX grants. Can't find another way of contacting you. I'm working on roostrent.com, a georgsit startup aiming to buy-all-the-land using co-ops (disintermediate all the agents, use the increased margins to get investors to agree to rent controls). £36k ARR, preseed round now, 53 units.
Up for a chat?
This is a funny follow up to the meditation post, since I view “a witch took my penis” and “I experienced jhana” as pretty similar claims. But in both cases I am very interested in why the person makes that claim. Both seem obviously absurd to me, yet people clearly do and did claim them, so I want to know what is going on to make them do so.
I would’ve guessed the anecdote about the parish priest’s schwanz to be a joke, but I don’t know enough about how they viewed priests and celibacy in the Germanic lands of that day so I may be reading too much into it.
A witch taking your penis is falsifiable (albeit not in public). If I say I experienced jhana, no way to prove that one way or the other.
Well, this comment of mine is probably one post too late but I'd assume jhana is something one could spot via EEG, blood flow or somesuch: it's just a flow state but over extreme concentration directed towards the internal rather than external, a sort of a benevolent mental glitch where your internal reward signal wraps in on itself.
You perfect that and you feel that reward signal for focusing on focusing on focusing... and so on, till you manage to feel relaxed while focused which sounds contradictory but isn't that much weirder to me than say the 'third hand illusion'.
The problem with meditation is that many people generally are intuitively averse to unnatural mental states and the notion that cognition has 'bugs' one can exploit - just because that very premise hints at how our brains are not as infallible as we'd like to believe.
I'd say it's the same 'fear of the unknown' just pointed in a different direction, lots of mental states exist that we don't bother naming and that's just one of those.
And one more thought: besides the socio-cultural, there is a psychological and even a psychiatric component to the occult, the religious and meditation at large.
I don't believe in anything supernatural but all these attempt to invoke uncommon mental states for different purposes but all of them would seem exotic and difficult to explain if experienced sparingly: intense faith is nigh indistinguishable from extreme focus save for the internal explanations one has and both give rise to states that aren't something evolution would have done anything about.
E.g. one of the common Buddhist meditation methods involves guiding oneself into a temporary MDD-like state over a few days by internally interrupting any flow state by deliberately noticing each action you'd take. It's beneficial to an extent but it's a bit hard to imagine anyone stumbling onto it by accident without first being surrounded by a specific kind of a civilization.
And in modernity, it's hard to sell someone on being temporarily depressed just for insight over what depression is and how to use it for productivity(!).
I am amusing myself by reading this an mentally replacing "witches" with "AGI".
Whatever else you are concerned about, there is no way it is anywhere close to as bad as AGI. If you had the faintest idea how bad AGI really is, you would be freaking out all the time. You need to stop whatever you were doing before and become some kind of AGI-minimizer instead.
Sorry for the low content, but this really hit the spot. Thank you!
Joseph Glanvill because a member of the Royal Society in 1664, when the Royal Society was only 4 years old (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellow_of_the_Royal_Society). He was one of leading advocates for science in the later seventeenth century.
He also wrote a book about the experimental evidence for witches, called Saducismus triumphatus, or, Full and plain evidence concerning witches and apparitions. From the Preface:
"I have no humour nor delight in telling Stories, and do not publish these for the gratification of those that have; but I record them as Arguments for the confirmation of a Truth which hath indeed been attested by multitudes of the like Evidences in all places and times. But things remote, or long past, are either not believed or forgotten: whereas these being fresh and near, and attended with all the circumstances of credibility it may be expected they should have the more success upon the obstinacy of Unbelievers.
But after all this, I must confess, there is one Argument against me, which is not to be dealt with, viz. a mighty confidence grounded upon nothing, that swaggers, and huffs, and swears there are no Witches. For such Philosophers as these, let them enjoy the Opinion of their own Superlative Judgements, and enter me in the first rank of Fools for crediting my Senses, and those of all the World, before their sworn Dictates. If they will believe in Scott, Hobbes, and Osborne, and think them more infallible than the Sacred Oracles, the History of all Ages, and the full experience of our own, who can help it?"
I wonder if there were contemporaries that pointed out the huge problems with torture as a proof method.
That one doesn't seem to rely on unintuitive psych theory regarding true confessions and false confessions, the unreliability of memory and such, just common sense.
Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic but I feel like even in the 15th century I would have been able to see the problems with it torture, if not witchcraft.
Not quite a contemporary, but Friedrich Spee is your guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Spee
I wrote about the Malleus Maleficarum a couple weeks ago, as an example of the annoying kind of dystopian literature... the kind that serves as self-pitying war propaganda for the powerful: a shrill compendium of elite grievances; a comically grim warning that anyone who ignores their noble demands may threaten our cherished hegemonic norms. The whiney excuses of unstable critics who have accidentally found themselves in power.
What I found interesting was that the book begins by claiming that rampant unchecked witchcraft could soon cause the apocalypse; it then includes a papal bull granting priests the “full and entire liberty” to stamp out sorcery, followed by a notarized statement of unanimous support by the local university’s doctors of theology. Next there’s an extended section criticizing any clergymen who doubt the widespread reality of this crime. Only after all this throat-clearing do we get the diagnostic manual and the trial guide, with clear step-by-step instructions on how to identify and prosecute such supposedly overbearing menaces. (Of course, the author’s real issue lay with insufficiently zealous bureaucrats, who had exiled him from his parish for obsessing over one particular acquitted woman’s alleged promiscuity). It's as if the author is saying, "Look, witch-lovers, everyone important and powerful agrees that we really need to do something about this right now, because otherwise nobody will ever do anything to stop it!”
The same basic story describes Matthew Hopkins, an itinerant witch-finder who during England’s revolution through some depraved spell-work single-handedly hexed more than a hundred souls gallows-ward for witchcraft, for social stability. (England as a whole hunted fewer witches through the entire prior century combined than he did in just three years, because this whiney degenerate kind of cultural coordination can be quite angrily powerful).
Modern-day analogues are almost too obvious to mention. You can make a decent career out of anti-fascistically whipping up mobs against whoever might harbor some pre-smartphone conservative sentiments, since those reactionary extremists existentially threaten us now: just look at how disagreeable and low-status the self-identified right-wingers have become, ever since we’ve thoroughly stigmatized their beliefs… do you really think such dinosaurs are worth defending? Likewise, during the Salem trials—which ironically occurred when the King revoked all Massachusetts law, leaving litigants without a judge’s firm paternalistic limits—one chorus of attention-seeking teenage girls cried out “me too!” every time that any of them claimed to have been victimized by someone else’s problematic behavior; each defendant who confessed and then blamed others for seeming similarly witchy got pardoned, while those who refused to play along died. Unfortunately I can’t think of any modern-day analogues to this, but Arthur Miller’s famous play about it apparently allegorized a “red scare,” during which an uncouth populist senator tried investigating some of the countless communist spies now known to have utterly infested our postwar government (though I’m sure that having to testify before congress about your own alleged treason would have seemed scary and, moreover, inconvenient, especially for those whom they caught red-handed). Etc.
My post mostly tries to flesh out what's wrong with this kind of fundamentally disingenuous and cowardly dystopian literature, and gesture towards what more honest political horror could look like. Ultimately, I argue that generative language models will rapidly worsen this YA-ification of power: the tendency to endow victimhood and weakness with moral status, and for power to speak in such a wheedling cowardly voice.
https://cebk.substack.com/p/the-power-of-babble
This is all pretty reasonable imo
I think you mean “snitchin is bitchin”.
I once dated a girl who prayed for bad things to happen to her roommate when she was pissed at her roommate and then bad things did happen to her roommate. She was dead seriously convinced she had some witch/occult power of making holy curses.
We all thought she was crazy, and I am SUPER glad I never knocked her up.
Late Prof. Marvin Harris (great anthropologist, "hated" by Steven Pinker - long story, mainly about Napoleon Chagnon) - had a fine fun-theory about witches: Hardly any were hunted and burnt during the middle ages, when THE church was strong, but after 1500 (during the "Neuzeit"/"modern era") during a time, when the church(es) had to justify their role. Defending us from those evil witches was a great way to do this. So they did. Luther as eager to burn them as any pope in Rome. - see the excellent book: "Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches. The Riddles of Culture"
An article from 2018 about folklore:
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/ireland-s-darkest-oddest-and-weirdest-secrets-uncovered-1.3418059
"Of the 141 entries featuring witches, 40 of them deal with hags taking on the form of hares when trying to escape from farmers who catch them sucking milk from their cows’ udders.
The information is presented in factual and specific form: Mrs Paddy Brady from Kilteane, Co Cavan, reports that she "knows of a woman who turned herself into a hare. Her name was Mrs Hutchington, a Protestant woman who lived in the townland of Ryeforth, Co Cavan. She went to my grandfather, Bennie Goldrick, and sucked the milk from the cow. Grandfather saw her; he got his gun loaded it with a crucked [sic] sixpence, fired at the hare and hit her on the head. She ran away, and he ran after her to her house, where he found the woman in the bed with her head bleeding. He made her promise to never do that again, so she did not." An addendum tells that a crooked threepenny or sixpenny piece was used since only a silver bullet had the power to kill a witch-hare."
This is, admittedly, a little bit off-topic, but I feel that, every time somebody cites the Spanish Inquisition and witches in the same article, a little bit of historical context should be added. It's worth reflecting on the fact that, according to the latest estimates, in Europe in the Modern Age some 50,000 witches were burned: half in the German territories, 4,000 in Switzerland, 1,500 in England, 4,000 in France. In Spain, the witch victims of the Inquisition were 27 in total, including all the imperial territories, according to its exhaustive historical archives (in a recent study in Catalonia -- https://www.abc.es/espana/catalunya/abci-parlamento-catalan-indulta-mujeres-ajusticiadas-brujeria-202201261825_noticia.html -- there are more examples, but the vast majority were victims of neighborhood vendettas, often after being exonerated, rather than accused, by the Inquisition). Witches and witch-hunting are a northern European obsession and specialty, inherited by countries with a majority of northern European settlers, like the US, and any reference in this context to the Spanish Inquisition should be, if anything, praiseworthy.
Agrred. I was shocked when I first read https://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Phil%20281b/Philosophy%20of%20Magic/Arcana/Witchcraft%20and%20Grimoires/witch_hunt.html, written by, apparently, a wiccan historian.
Shocked because it argues that the 'the spanish Inquisition' and the catholic church did pretty much the opposite of what I had always read - that they were enthusiastic witch-burners - and instead, generally acted to cool mobs who were eager to burn 'em witches. Quoting some early christian laws and texts that declared that it's *Pagans* who believe in witchcraft - it's all a deception by the Devil, and that it is **accusations of witchcraft** that are to be punished. There are also descriptions of the Inquisition recognizing that there are witch crazes and the thing to do is to stop the "conspiracy theories" from spreading, keep a cool head and let it die down; of the Inquisition intervening in a witch craze to claim THEY are the only ones with jurisdiction to judge witchcraft cases, only to then refuse to carry them on.
For a Theory 3, the descriptions of the rituals, spells, covens, etcetera around witches & witchcraft sounds like the kind of thing that all modern tumblr-witches I've known would have been super into. Cults have had a draw forever, and witch covens sound here like a cult where you get to participate in cool rituals & ceremonies, you get to have sex with people in a sexually repressed society, and you also get supposed magic powers, then it would surprise me if there were not real people who were in real witchcraft cults who thought they were real witches.
I’d go much stronger on the hypothesis that some people were really trying to do witchcraft. Essentially everybody in medieval Europe was doing magic, carrying around charms and doing garbled Latin incantations and such for good health, to get pregnant, whatever. A lot of this was tolerated by the decadent pre-Reformation church as long as there was a veneer of the magic being powered by Jesus. So it’s really a very small jump from superstitious use of charmed saints’ bones to trying to invoke the really good stuff via Satan, and I’m sure it was very common for people to slip this way. Keith Thomas’”Religion and the Decline of Magic” is a great treatment of how this background shifted from late medieval to early modern times in England.
Reading the accounts of penis theft, I wonder whether it was basically an elaborate excuse for handjobs. Imagine that a man paid a prostitute to commit this act (perhaps hoping to avoid pregnancy) but got caught. "Um...actually she was just a witch restoring the penis she stole!" If other people in the village didn't like her (including perhaps the man's wife), they might go along with this weird story as a way to justify bringing down the force of the church on her head. I'm not sure if this is compatible with accounts of penis theft in other cultures, though.
> His arguments ring hollow to modern ears, and honestly neither God nor the Devil comes out looking very good. God isn’t trying to maximize a 21st century utilitarian view of the Good, He’s trying to maximize His own glory. Allowing some evil helps with this, because then He can justly punish it (and being just is glorious) or mercifully forgive it (and being merciful is also glorious). But, if God let the Devil kill everyone in the world, then there would be no one left to praise God’s glory, plus people might falsely think God couldn’t have stopped the Devil if he’d wanted to. So the glory-maximizing option is to give the Devil some power, but not too much.
This is the most convincing argument I've seen for Theodicy, although it does mean giving up the claim that god is pure good.
I like the empathy towards the witch hunters in this review, who I think often get a bad rap from modern audiences. In the medieval world, it’s not like the choices were between witch trials and modern jurisprudence, it was much more likely a choice between mob rule and royal/church abuse of power. Witch trials were a form of due process, as you point out, by people who didn’t understand very much about the world.
My only remark is to regret the number of people who have come to see this Malleus Maleficarum by Kramer as the text that defines the christians' views of witches and witchcraft.
It seems clear to me that Kramer was an angry crank subject to a variant of the 80s-era satanism scare (in addition to being apparently a swindler). The one case of him actually trying witches, in the city of Innsbruck, went down in flames, resulting in no convictions, and the bishop of Brixen ordering him to stop pestering the good citizens of Innsbruck and get the fuck out of town.
Frustrated and angry, he wrote this book to explain his views, that were antithetical to what had long been the mainstream view of witches among learned christians, the long-held traditional Catholic law, the Canon Episcopi, that considered witchcraft a delusion (cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Episcopi). Contemporaries like Ulrich Molitor, Jean Vincent or Nicholas of Cusa were skeptical and laid back about witches. On this I could suggest
https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/35002/341393.pdf