There are times when the intellectual fantasies of the clergy seem more bizarre than the psychopathic delusions of the madhouse out of which they have, too often, been excogitated.Įxcellent for other reasons not adumbrated here. He said the Devil could only discharge as incubus what he had previously absorbed as succubus. Thomas Aquinas, the second founder of demonology after St. Some thought the Devil swiped the testicles off the dead and impregnated the witches with borrowed vital essences, but the church eventually followed the teaching of St. But this was a problem wasn’t the devil neuter? A great deal of theological thinking was expended in the attempt to resolve this matter. In the first chapter, Trevor-Roper was discussing various clerical theories of how the Devil managed to beget offspring after having sex with witches at night in the form of an incubus, that visited female witches or a succubus, that visited male witches. Trevor-Roper’s classic work The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, which I was quite enjoying. Rarely is history so weird as in this book, which addresses the theology behind the old witch hunts, and shows the backwards grasping for reasons, justifications and explanations, so familiar to us today, but become ludicrous with the benefit of hindsight. In this study, Professor Trevor-Roper reveals the social and intellectual background to the witch-craze of the 16th and 17th centuries. So I thought I should repost my review of an obscure history book. Witch hunts are always a relevant topic, as we live in a time when internet witch hunts are rife.
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