The Dark Side of the Enlightenment

'The reading of any work of literature becomes richer and more intelligible when conducted against the background of the intellectual climate in which it was created, but for the period of the Enlightenment the historical "background" is often indispensable. First in preparing to write the book and then again while actually writing it, I spent several years pursuing such apparently disparate topics as alchemy, epistolary culture, Renaissance Egyptology, Jansenism, Pietism, the spread of Freemasonry in France, and the rise and decline of the literary salon. I say "apparently" disparate because one at length discovers in the period of the Enlightenment, as of course in other historical periods, some convincing overarching unities.'

Medievalist John V. Fleming explores The Dark Side of the Enlightenment in his recently published book at at the educated general reader. He 'chose the title The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, which is meant to be goo-humored as well as lighthearted, for probably obvious reasons. It seems rather catcy. It plays against the flattering idea of intellectual and spiritual illumination that gave birth to the word "Enlightenment," as well as its principal European equivalents, the French Lumières and the German Aufklärung. Since the period of the Enlightenment witnessed, among other things, a remarkable efflorescence of occultism and mysticism, and since such topics occupy much of my attention, the title seemed to me not merely appropriate but inevitable.'

The subtitle alludes to wizards, alchemists, and spiritual seekers in the Age of Reason, including convulsionists, the Rosy Cross, the Freemasons, and Cagliostro. The latter 'performed feats of clairvoyance ranging from the humdrum (locating mislaid peices of property) to the sensational. The empress Maria Theresa, the mother of the French queen, died on November 19, 1780. It is about eight hundred miles from Vienna to Paris. Ordinary carriage travel might be as slow as thirty miles a day, and even the fastest express relay couriers would require upward of a week. Cagliostro, newly arrived in Strassburg, had quite publicly (and daringly) predicted her death to Cardinal Rohan, with whom he had already ingratiated himself. "He even foretold the hour at which she would expire," writes Madame d'Oberkirch. "Monsier de Rohan told it me in the evening, and it was five days after that the news arrived."'

Fleming also provides a substrate of what alchemy was about, a subject nowadays hard to penetrate, but at the time still part of the intellectual context: 'Literary and iconographic evidence alike attest to the very widespread cultural diffusion of alchemical ideas and images throughout the Enlightenment period. It is true that among many thinkers, alchemy had a musty and medieval whiff about it. Yet insofar as there was a "popular" idea of a scientist, it found its expression in the image of a learned man laboring amid his exotic implements with their exotic names. In the year 1700 almost anybody interested in "the advancement of science" was likely to have an interest in alchemy; and even as experimental science developed during the eighteenth century, the alchemical dream remained vivid for many scientists.'

The Dark Side of the Enlightenment is published by W. W. Norton & Company. The cover is taken from a painting by Pietro Longhi.

Enchanted Europe

This recently published study looks like an interesting book: Enchanted Europe. Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250-1750 by Euan Cameron, member of the departments of Religion and History at Columbia University and author of The European Reformation. According to the publisher, Oxford University Press, this new book 'charts the rise and fall of superstition in European history - from magical healing, spells, and divination, to the widespread belief in fairies and demons', 'explores the debate over folklore from medieval times, through to the Renaissance, Reformation, and the Enlightenment', and 'sets shifting nature of 'superstition' in historical context - from threat to 'true religion' to 'harmless' ethnic heritage':

'Since the dawn of history people have used charms and spells to try to control their environment, and forms of divination to try to foresee the otherwise unpredictable chances of life. Many of these techniques were called "superstitious" by educated elites.

For centuries religious believers used "superstition" as a term of abuse to denounce another religion that they thought inferior, or to criticize their fellow-believers for practising their faith "wrongly." From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, scholars argued over what 'superstition' was, how to identify it, and how to persuade people to avoid it. Learned believers in demons and witchcraft, in their treatises and sermons, tried to make 'rational' sense of popular superstitions by blaming them on the deceptive tricks of seductive demons.

Every major movement in Christian thought, from rival schools of medieval theology through to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, added new twists to the debates over superstition. Protestants saw Catholics as superstitious, and vice versa. Enlightened philosophers mocked traditional cults as superstitions. Eventually, the learned lost their worry about popular belief, and turned instead to chronicling and preserving 'superstitious' customs as folklore and ethnic heritage.

Enchanted Europe offers the first comprehensive, integrated account of western Europe's long, complex dialogue with its own folklore and popular beliefs. Drawing on many little-known and rarely used texts, Euan Cameron constructs a compelling narrative of the rise, diversification, and decline of popular 'superstition' in the European mind.'

I found a review of the book which sums up her reading of it this way:

'The picture that emerges from his analysis is not as simple as one might believe. Although many think of the journey towards Enlightenment as one of, literally, ‘disenchantment’ – a slow erosion of faith in magic in favour of scientific rationalism - Cameron shows how clerics and religious thinkers on both sides of the Catholic/Protestant divide long maintained a belief in the supernatural. However, whereas clerics of all denominations were determined to divide the universe into sharply polarised realms of good or evil according to their own particular dogma, the lay population inhabited a far more morally ambivalent world based upon more practical needs. As Cameron explains, ‘ordinary poor people [...] feared the loss of health or property and sought whatever remedies might work’ – whether approved by ecclesiastical authority or derived from forbidden folk remedies and rituals.

Although this is hardly an anecdotal work, some interesting stories emerge along the way. In the earliest days of Christianity, St Augustine mounted a vigorous offensive against the fading Roman pantheon by literally ‘demonising’ the gods. The original meaning of the Greek word daimon (daemon), in terms of a tutelary spirit, was gradually overlaid with negative connotations, reaching its zenith in medieval hysteria relating to demonic possession. (Interestingly, the original definition of the word was only to be widely rediscovered and rehabilitated in our own age via the novels of Philip Pullman).

Perhaps the overall lesson of Cameron’s book is that any attempt to impose a rigid external order on human culture and imagination will have only limited success. As he points out in the final chapter, by the 18th century, Europe’s intellectuals had ‘lost their fear’ of witchcraft, demons and superstitions and therefore expended much less energy in keeping them at bay. In the centuries that followed, post-Enlightenment thinkers actually began to embrace what they had previously sought to explain away and acknowledged the power of superstitious belief as part of a rich cultural tapestry of ethnic heritage. He suggests that the Romantic era, renewed Victorian interest in spiritualism and occultism and more recent New Age thinking have much in common in this regard, aided and abetted by nation states’ lack of interest in enforcing religious discipline on their subjects, at least in the West.'

A Vampire Booklet

I was pretty surprised when I received this book the other day. It must be the smallest book on vampires I have ever seen. A 68 page reprint of a paper on Calmet and the French vampire debate of the Enlightenment bye Charles Porset originally published in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 266, 1989, p. 125-150. Including a few well-known illustrations by Goya. It is published by A l'Orient.

240 years ago

Although the title page actually says 1769, on December 31st it was 240 years since the Constitutio Criminalis Theresiana was published. This criminal law passed by Empress Maria Theresa was her attempt at unifying criminal law throughout the countries under Austrian rule, thereby putting an end to various local judicial practices. E.g. the Theresiana aimed at limiting the use of torture for judicial purposes, and consequently it contains various descriptions in text and figures on the minutiae of the methods of torture. The parts of the book describing these methods are available in a German book publish by Reprint-Verlag in Leipzig: Folterwerkzeuge und ihre Anwendung 1769. This is not pleasant reading, and the pain inflicted by the torture is clearly visible on the faces of the victims in the illustrations.


The Theresiana also deals with cases of witchcraft and in that sense sums up Maria Theresa's previous endeavours to fight acts of superstition like the burning of corpses suspected of magia posthuma, see e.g. this post, although the Theresiana apparently had to be more conservative than the actual practice. Witchcraft trials had actually been abolished in 1766.

Fortunately, less than twenty years later torture was abolished with the criminal law passed by Maria Theresa's son Joseph II in 1787.

Online the Theresiana is available as a PDF file.

Black and white myths and the not so clear-cut facts

Unlike the talkative and humorous book on vampires mentioned recently, Rita Voltmer's Hexen. Wissen was stimmt (Herder) is succinct and to the point. It is short - just 128 pages - and practically layouted in two colours to make it easy to find and understand the information you need. In that sense, it's an exemplary example of how to communicate the current knowledge of a historical topic.

A majority of the book focuses on debunking a number of myths, misperceptions and manipulations. Voltmer exposes and confronts each of them with a short overview of current knowledge and explains the practice and thinking of contemporary experts and laymen of the early modern period.

Typically, the myths are very clear-cut, but the facts are not. However, in many cases we are familiar with the myths from comics, novels or movies about witches or from e.g. feminist neopaganist literature. But precisely our familiarity with the more or less fictional constructs about witches and the witch hunters is all the more reason why Voltmer's book is a welcome chance to disseminate a more correct understanding of the subject.

Some of the myths concern the pretty fantastic claims that several millions were accused of witchcraft and executed, that it was a medieval phenomenon, that the persecutions were largely of a misogynistic nature, that a witch was easily identifiable as either an old hag with warts or as a sexy midwife with red hair etc. etc.

Although debunking some of the more ridiculous myths about the torture - as seen in e.g. torture museums - it is quite unpleasant to read about this aspect of the judicial procedures against serious crimes like witchcraft. Voltmer provides a brief explanation of the views that justified the procedures, namely concerning the transcendent aspect of the torment, because the court was not only fighting the witch, but also the Devil by saving the witch's soul from eternal damnation.

Voltmer also questions the simplified explanations that have been provided for the whole phenomenon, yes, she even debunks the construction 'witch hunt'. For the purposes of this blog, it is particularly interesting to note that the Enlightenment (itself a construct) did not expose the witch hunt as a miscarriage of justice, and that it was not disbelief in witchcraft or fear of witches that stopped the witch hunt, but rather other concerns like e.g. considerations concerning the judicial use of torture. She also discards with the simple way of opposing rationalism and belief that is still so common, but not very useful when applied to history, cf. also my posts on the rationality of the past.

Finally, people might think that there is no witch hunt today, but Voltmer reminds us that, although not a witch hunt per se in the Christian sense, around the world, e.g. in some parts of Africa, people are still being persecuted for various sorts of witchcraft or magic, including vampirism!

However, Voltmer is worried that the historians who are researching the history of the early modern witch hunt may suffer the fate of a Don Quijote fighting wind mills in their attempt to put an end to all the popular myths, manipulations and conspiration theories about witches that are prevalent in movies, novels and the media in general. Hopefully, her book will be read and help fight the common myths. I heartily recommend it to anyone who needs a brief, but precise overview of the subject.

Demonomania

It is well-known that lycanthropy is a term that has been used in psychopathology, but I think it is fairly unnoticed that vampirism also has been used by various authors. The above excerpt from a German book on theories on mental illnesses from 1830 is just one example that vampirismus was used to describe a demonomania that could e.g. involve the belief in being attacked by dead people.

One of the things about the subject of magia posthuma that fascinates me, is how interlinked the concepts involved are with the development of the natural sciences and in general with our ways of perceiving the forces behind our world. Obviously, the concepts of a ghost, apparition or revenant changes over the course of centuries from the late medieval period when it was understood in light of the Catholic belief in Purgatory, through the debates between Protestants and Catholics, the epistemology of natural philosophy, medicine etc., and on to the 19th Century, when revenants are no longer corporeal corpses brought back to life but usually tend to be incorporeal and intangible entities. And so on, we get spiritualism, parapsychology etc., as our Western societies tend to become more and more secular.

Being myself educated in physics, I am pretty much fascinated by what actually happened during the scientific revolution when natural science in a more modern sense became the 'winning' world view. In the naive version, people got enlightened and stopped being superstitious, but history proves this perception wrong. The development was much more complex, and here the history of magia posthuma and vampires is an interesting and thought provoking example, in particular because many of the occurrences occur more or less at the time of what we nowadays would call The Enlightenment.

In fact, the above portion from a book shows that barely 100 years after the word vampire entered European languages, it was a term used in books on mental illnesses. What happened in between? There's an interesting story to tell.