The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [62]
In his 1982 book The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions, David Hufford describes an executive, university-educated, in his mid-thirties, who recalled a summer spent as a teenager in his aunt’s house. One night, he saw mysterious lights moving in the harbour. Afterwards, he fell asleep. From his bed he then witnessed a white, glowing figure climbing the stairs. She entered his room, paused, and then said - anticlimactically, it seems to me - “That is the linoleum.’ Some nights the figure was an old woman; in others, an elephant. Sometimes the young man was convinced the entire business was a dream; other times he was certain he was awake. He was pressed down into his bed, paralysed, unable to move or cry out. His heart was pounding. He was short of breath. Similar events transpired on many consecutive nights. What is happening here? These events took place before alien abductions were widely described. If the young man had known about alien abductions, would his old woman have had a large head and bigger eyes?
In several famous passages in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon described the balance between credulity and scepticism in late classical antiquity:
Credulity performed the office of faith; fanaticism was permitted to assume the language of inspiration, and the effects of accident or contrivance were ascribed to supernatural causes...
In modern times [Gibbon is writing in the middle eighteenth century], a latent and even involuntary scepticism adheres to the most pious dispositions. Their admission of supernatural truths is much less an active consent than a cold and passive acquiescence. Accustomed long since to observe and to respect the invariable order of Nature, our reason, or at least our imagination, is not sufficiently prepared to sustain the visible action of the Deity. But in the first ages of Christianity the situation of mankind was extremely different. The most curious, or the most credulous, among the pagans were often persuaded to enter into a society which asserted an actual claim of miraculous powers. The primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary events. They felt, or they fancied, that on every side they were incessantly assaulted by daemons, comforted by visions, instructed by prophecy, and surprisingly delivered from danger, sickness, and from death itself, by the supplications of the church...
It was their firm persuasion that the air which they breathed was peopled with invisible enemies; with innumerable daemons, who watched every occasion, and assumed every form, to terrify, and above all to tempt, their unguarded virtue. The imagination, and even the senses, were deceived by the illusions of distempered fanaticism; and the hermit, whose midnight prayer was oppressed by involuntary slumber, might easily confound the phantoms of horror or delight which had occupied his sleeping and his waking dreams...
[T]he practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude that, if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision. Their love of the marvellous and supernatural, their curiosity with regard to future events, and their strong propensity to extend their hopes and fears beyond the limits of the visible world, were the principal causes which favoured the establishment of Polytheism. So urgent on the vulgar is