Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
minds, is when Abba Poemen - one of the desert fathers of the
early Church - was asked,
'How do the demons fight against me?'
'The demons fight against you?' Father Poemen asked in turn.
'Our own wills become the demons, and it is these which attack us.'
The medieval attitudes on incubi and succubi were influenced
by Macrobius' fourth-century Commentary on the Dream of
Scipio, which went through dozens of editions before the European
Enlightenment. Macrobius described phantoms (phantasma)
seen 'in the moment between wakefulness and slumber'. The
dreamer 'imagines' the phantoms as predatory. Macrobius had a
sceptical side which his medieval readers tended to ignore.
Obsession with demons began to reach a crescendo when, in his
famous Bull of 1484, Pope Innocent VIII declared,
It has come to Our ears that members of both sexes do not
avoid to have intercourse with evil angels, incubi, and
succubi, and that by their sorceries, and by their incantations,
charms, and conjurations, they suffocate, extinguish, and
cause to perish the births of women
as well as generate numerous other calamities. With this Bull,
Innocent initiated the systematic accusation, torture and execution
of countless 'witches' all over Europe. They were guilty of
what Augustine had described as 'a criminal tampering with the
unseen world'. Despite the evenhanded 'members of both sexes'
in the language of the Bull, unsurprisingly it was mainly girls and
women who were so persecuted.
Many leading Protestants of the following centuries, their differences
with the Catholic Church notwithstanding, adopted nearly
identical views. Even humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus and
Thomas More believed in witches. 'The giving up of witchcraft,' said
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, 'is in effect the giving up of
the Bible.' William Blackstone, the celebrated jurist, in his Commentaries
on the Laws of England (1765), asserted:
To deny the possibility, nay, actual existence of witchcraft
and sorcery is at once flatly to contradict the revealed word
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