The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [199]
In A Candle in the Dark (1656), Thomas Ady addressed a key question:
Some again will object and say, If Witches cannot kill, and do many strange things by Witchcraft, why have many confessed that they have done such Murthers, and other strange matters, whereof they have been accused?
To this I answer, If Adam and Eve in their innocency were so easily overcome, and tempted to sin, how much more may poor Creatures now after the Fall, by persuasions, promises, and threatenings, by keeping from sleep, and continual torture, be brought to confess that which is false and impossible, and contrary to the faith of a Christian to believe?
It was not until the eighteenth century that the possibility of hallucination as a component in the persecution of witches was seriously entertained; Bishop Francis Hutchinson, in his Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (1718), wrote
Many a man hath verily believed he hath seen a spirit externally before him, when it hath been only an internal image dancing in his own brain.
Because of the courage of these opponents of the witch mania, its extension to the privileged classes, the danger it posed to the growing institution of capitalism, and especially the spread of the ideas of the European Enlightenment, witch burnings eventually disappeared. The last execution for witchcraft in Holland, cradle of the Enlightenment, was in 1610; in England, 1684; America, 1692; France, 1745; Germany, 1775; and Poland, 1793. In Italy, the Inquisition was condemning people to death until the end of the eighteenth century, and inquisitorial torture was not abolished in the Catholic Church until 1816. The last bastion of support for the reality of witchcraft and the necessity of punishment has been the Christian churches.
The witch mania is shameful. How could we do it? How could we be so ignorant about ourselves and our weaknesses? How could it have happened in the most ‘advanced’, the most ‘civilized’ nations then on Earth? Why was it resolutely supported by conservatives, monarchists and religious fundamentalists? Why opposed by liberals, Quakers and followers of the Enlightenment? If we’re absolutely sure that our beliefs are right, and those of others wrong; that we are motivated by good, and others by evil; that the King of the Universe speaks to us, and not to adherents of very different faiths; that it is wicked to challenge conventional doctrines or to ask searching questions; that our main job is to believe and obey - then the witch mania will recur in its infinite variations down to the time of the last man. Note Friedrich von Spec’s very first point, and the implication that improved public understanding of superstition and scepticism might have helped to short-circuit the whole train of causality. If we fail to understand how it worked in the last round, we will not recognize it as it emerges in the next.
‘It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion,’ said Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister. In George Orwell’s novel 1984, the ‘Big Brother’ state employs an army of bureaucrats whose only job is to alter the records of the past so they conform to the interests of those currently in power. 1984 was not just an engaging political fantasy; it was based on the Stalinist Soviet Union, where the re-writing of history was institutionalized. Soon after Stalin took power, pictures of his rival Leon Trotsky - a monumental figure in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions - began to disappear. Heroic and wholly anhistoric paintings of Stalin and Lenin together directing the Bolshevik Revolution took their place, with Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army, nowhere in evidence. These images became icons of the state. You could see them in every office building, on outdoor advertising signs sometimes ten storeys high, in museums, on postage