October, 2010 Given as part of Senior University Georgetown's Fall 2010 program.
   See also: 1a. Introduction to the Renaissance  1b. The Early History of Printing        2. Neoplatonism, Humanism, Other New Philosophical Trends   3. Syphilis: The Great Pox as an Acute Epidemic   4: Early Renaissance Medicine  ;                   (this is lecture 5 part 1... see Lecture 5 part 2)               6 Summary          

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Sexual hysteria / misogyny?
Disguised anti-semitism (Someone to scapegoat once the Jews had begun to emigrate east to Poland-Lithuania)
Age-ism, attention-seeking-children
Increased overall stress seeking scapegoats
Diversion from discontent with the Church
Attempt by Church to dominate increased interest in esotericism (lecture 2)
Lurid confessions extracted by the fear/threa/actuality of torture
Printed scandal sheets (even then!)
Financial gain from confiscation of accused assets
Status and financial gain from professional prosecutors and hunters

History is complex, and we should resist efforts to oversimplify it. The witch-hunts then (when there was a widespread deep belief in actual witches, demons, and Satan) and nowadays (when it's more metaphorical but still interestingly an expression of mass psychology) all resist excessive reduction.

The concept of "perfect storm" has become a theme in our culture, a convergence of multiple vulnerabilities whose aggregate effect tip the balance into some catastrophic result---originally applied to weather and sea factors related to a boat, but more recently explaining how electrical grids in part of the nation get overloaded, etc. Perhaps that is part of it.


Slide1,  Title.  I find this whole dynamic unpleasant, but it must be done.

Slide 2. Yes, it’s the witches, the innocent women, and some men and children, but also it’s all those groups who have been the butt of prejudice, of scapegoating, of genocide, throughout history. It’s about our power to collectively do evil, to engage in mass hysteria. Mass hysteria need not be overtly dramatic. It expresses itself often in subtle and methodical ways, as the Nazi officers did as they built death camps. Very efficient and cold-blooded.

It can be in the ways people designed ever-more refined torture instruments. So hysteria can be applied very cold-bloodedly. And here’s the psychology factor—because I’m one of those psychiatrists who is at heart a depth psychologist—is that the psychology of thinking very cleverly in elaborating an idea can convince oneself and others that one is indeed thoughtful, and disguise or obscure the awareness that what is thought about is based on profoundly unrealistic assumptions!

    Say it again, because it is key: Being smart in ten ways doesn’t outweigh the possibility that all that smartness is in service of one other way—the underlying assumption—that is really dumb and potentially nasty.

     So we’re talking about optimizing intellectual humility again, as we did with the other lectures.

3. Santayana.

4. I want to note another psychology very relevant to our upcoming halloween. Not only roller coasters, but lots of activities we do and enjoy have to do with mastering our inner child’s conservativism, our timidity. We strive to be brave, to engage the world, and even engage in what might be called counter-phobic behavior: If it is scarey, let’s go there, let’s do it. Sometimes this over-reaches into the foolish and self-destructive—the fast car, the drugs. But sometimes it adds spice to life. Anyway, it’s part of normal psychology—edging into the risk-taking, and even creating situations that generate that scarey movie, scarey haunted-house thing.

Then there’s the opposite drive, neutralizing the fear by making it not so scarey, making monsters loveable when you get to know them. Well, then, they’re not really monsters at all, are they. I mean, come on. The Monsters in Monsters, Incorporated movie are funny alien life forms. Glenda the good witch in the Wizard of Oz—do you remember who played her?  Billie Burke? — anyway, what’s this about “good witch”?  So we make all nicey-nicey that which is or was originally rather scarey. That trend can be found in literature, too. Harry Potter etc.

Harry Potter brings up a theme about the cross-over between witches and magic, sorcery and high-technology, psychic abilities and other uncanny transformations and the blurry frontiers there. I don’t know what more to say right now than it’s another frontier of this whole phenomenon. In history there are many edges and interfaces.

4. Halloween card

5. Bewitched

6. Poem

7. Snow White   and now we begin our entrance into the haunted house, the scarey parts...

8. Time line... what we’re talking about.   Note that this lecture will include a fair amount of the mid-late Renaissance, the next hundred to two hundred years...

9. Darkness

10.   Where it happened   Central Europe
          Not so much in Italy, some in East Europe, some in England, Scotland, and Colonial America...

11   Sylvanius... and it happened in Christiandom because for the previous millennium and more the Church had been trying to replace the celtic and pagan religions of the various regions. In many areas, in Africa, in the Americas, over the last few hundred years, the sociology of imported religion is that it is often grafted over the folk religion and in many ways, the qualities of the folk religion shines through with a veneer of being re-framed as Christianity. Grafting grape vines onto root stock, grafting politics, writing systems, and other forms—this mixing happens.

12. Witchcraft has always been around, but it wasn’t such a terrible sin, nor was it viewed as a conspiracy of whole groups that had to be wiped out. It was more a lapse into naughtiness that required penance. But the crusades did something interesting to Christianity. There was much more focus on death and demonology, the struggle of good and evil. That’s a whole ‘nother talk.

13. DeMolay

14  The Templars made witchcraft big business. They could do with this group what they did to the Jews—demonize them, exile them, murder them, and take their money. Don’t forget to take their money.

15. There was also the impact of ignorance seeking help from a profession that was itself just emerging from the it’s-all-god’s-punishment and hitting the wall of its own ignorance. So maybe it is demons or witches doing it. Hmm

16   This is important, though. This period was rough in terms of all four of these horsemen of the apocalypse— there were indeed diseases and death, new diseases, too; and famines and weather fluctuations are notable in the thinner sizes of tree rings during this early-modern era; and there were wars and campaigns of conquest. And the people were highly stressed, near PTSD, and this created a platform for scapegoating.

17. There were many other possible causes combining to make a perfect storm, a phrase used when a number of different causative factors unfortunately appear at around the same time and pile on each other.

18. People will seek meaning—it’s as instinctive as a baby bonding to its mother or the desire for water and food.  So what’s the cause of the storm?  Something has to be identified. Malignant intent? Someone must have meant to do evil unto us. Who more than the professionals—and witches were professional evil-doers. (Now evil-doers are criminals fought by super-heroes, but then...)

19. More factors...

20. Rule 1: Make the “other” really bad! Make them worthy of the direst of punishments. I don’t enjoy doing cruel things, this hurts me more than it does you kind of thinking, but you made me.

21. The Jews, for example. There was hate literature. This was in a late 1400s scandal sheet in Germany, one of the negative offshoots of printing. And why not just lie? Who’s going to contradict you? So there was this legend of ritual murder—leveled against the Christians themselves at one time for the whole blood and body of Christ— attributed to the Jews. How else would they make their communion? Where would they get the blood from.
     Truth: They don’t use blood, never did, it was all projection. No fire behind the smoke.

22. Anyway, there was more blame to go around than the Jews could absorb. There was trouble and it must be because they got together and planned it!  Yikes!  Truth is that witches today—or nice women trying to form a local organization—are troubled by as many political problems and tendencies towards internal conflicts and schism and petty grudges as any other professional or social or educational or group period. People haven’t learned to work together smoothly in groups yet. It may take centuries...

23. It was nice to lump them together, though, Jews and Witches. It justified prejudice and acts of violence against both groups.

24. Some typical accusations or triggers...

25, Demonize.. Fantasize...

26. Tell stories, darkness—remember darkness? — witches, and who’s that guy with his knee up ... is he a corpse or still alive... woooo.. Shiver...

27.   It’s even more scarey if you imagine that they are a whole gang, they’re all bad, there they are dancing in a circle, making circle magic in front... riding on broomsticks... woooo   and back then it wasn’t a wooo with a wink. They took it all seriously and it added to the stress even as it demystified in their own minds the causes of the stress.

28. So we’ll spend a bit of time noticing the themes that got people willing to torture people who they used to deal with as nice neighbors. First you got to demonize them, imagine them really not as nice but deep down nasty. Look in on their parties, or at least your fantasy of their parties.
29. There was a rich literature that spread around through pamphlets with pictures like this.

30. Sex, the equivalent of drugs, and rock and roll.

31 more

32, you can just hear them laughing—all of this is a projection of the quality of cruelty that remains as a residue of childhood’s capacity not just to be innocent, but also capable of truly horrible cruelty to the less powerful.. Animal pets, etc. kids on kids...

33. Here’s another sabbat. It has all the elements..

34. Those little red lines are clever representations of magic through geometry... intricate designs that don’t occur in peasant life...

35, sign your soul away, cauldrons, magic, incantations.. Wow.. Note there’s a secret fascination, sort of I’d like to know how to do that but don’t want to lose my soul.
     There’s another psychology here, the excitement of going away from the mommy when you were about 2 and running back to her when you got scared and feeling that she’d be there to protect you... so this back-and-forth dynamic has a deep appeal..

36 and its sexy, too...

37. Appeals to all sectors of childish but imagined-to-be-forbidden curiosity, like when you escaped to read and play your own worlds..

38 here’s another big etching with all the elements laid out as different kinds of wickedness...

39 certain stereotypes, like the magic cauldron, cooking not eye of newt, but frog, which is sort of the slimy same,,   and broomsticks which are sexual indeed...

40.  And in the vapors and magical storms conjured and brewed up, witches can hone in without benefit of control tower, and if anyone missed the sexual thing... just to be one step more explicit without being overtly pornographic...

41 And all sorts of temptations to enjoyment—which is too close to having fun. Much of spirituality tried to break away from the chains of the body... was ascetic, even masochistic..  While goats were unabashedly, shamelessly sensual, sexual,  

42 so the devil and the goat were conflated, combined, ... there’s more symbolism here than I know about.. But it was such an obvious turn on both royal and ecclesiastical courts...

43 and then music and dancing... still for some sub-groups a no-no in a number of ascetic religions..

44 frog-fishing...

45 and lords and ladies in their finery—an interesting dig at the upper classes... who were supposed to be above reproach, but there was always a mixture of envy and contempt from the lower classes...

46.. And festive meals, but with forbidden foods...

47.  And the imagine shape-shifting powers, turning into animals, still a theme in some comic books..

48   I like this attempt to associate pleasure with sin...    Remember Savanarola’s late 1400s bonfire of the vanities — the association of holiness with humility and beyond humility to stark over-seriousness, which was expressed a century or more later in puritanism...

49 The point here is that... well, to quote the late Adolf Hitler, if you tell people a lie frequently enough, and the lie is big enough, people will begin to believe you!

50 And the mixture of magic and flying, the dark and the mystery of women, birth, menstruation, other secret stuff... all resonate with deep human intuitions—Carl Jung called these “archetypes”

... Continue to next webpage, Part 2:

In Egypt, evidence of the presence of smallpox is the markings on the face of the mummy of thePharaoah, Ramses V, around 1150 BCE:.

 

Of course, there could be stories for each of the following breatkthroughs, but I haven’t read up enough about the details.

What may have been be one of the last cases of smallpox.	Polio immunization in India.

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References

Cawthorne, Nigel. (2003). Wtich-hunt: history of a persecution. London: Arcturus.
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