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

The Demon-Haunted World
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 the necessity of believing, that the fall
of any system of mythology will most probably be succeeded
by the introduction of some other mode of superstition . . .
Put aside Gibbon's social snobbery: the devil tormented the upper
classes too, and even a king of England - James I, the first Stuart
monarch - wrote a credulous and superstitious book on demons
(Daemonologie, 1597). He was also the patron of the great
translation of the Bible into English that still bears his name. It
was King James's opinion that tobacco is the 'devil's weed', and a
number of witches were exposed through their addiction to this
drug. But by 1628, James had become a thoroughgoing sceptic -
mainly because adolescents had been found faking demonic
possession, in which state they had accused innocent people of
witchcraft. If we reckon the scepticism that Gibbon says characterized
his time to have declined in ours, and if even a little of the
rampant gullibility he attributes to late classical times is left over
in ours, should we not expect something like demons to find a
niche in the popular culture of the present?
Of course, as enthusiasts for extraterrestrial visitations are
quick to remind me, there's another interpretation of these
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