A Biographical Dictionary of the Saints: With a General Introduction on Hagiology Book

I had the impression before reading this book, having vague memories of reading one of this author's works many years ago, that he had been biased in favour of the Catholic church (he was an Anglian who converted to Catholicism) when it came to witchcraft, and regarded everyone accused by the Protestants as innocent people wrongfully persecuted, whereas those accused by the Catholic church were all witches. I didn't find that in the current book, but it would have been better if that had been its only fault, because this read like the worst kind of paranoid conspiracy theory, written in a sort of stream of consciousness in which various subjects were veered off from at tangents onto something else and then back again pages later. For example, early on during a discussion of pre-Christian magic, the narrative veers off into describing instances of conjoined twins that occurred through history before returning to the actual topic in question.

The bias in this book is against anyone who was ever accused of witchcraft by anyone, no matter how flimsy or improbable the testimony against them. And such people were all devil worshippers and Satanists, even centuries before the Christian church was established, and in civilisations and religions which had no concept of the Judaeo-Christian Lucifer/Satan figure, including the original South American beliefs of societies such as the Aztecs.

The Malleus Maleficarum, (Hammer of Witches), written by two Inquisitors, and notorious as a ghastly manual for how to convict people labelled as witches, is called a "noble" book, and the author never seems to grasp that the identikit nature of witch confessions (which to him are proof that they are all "true") was due to torture (which he acknowledges) and the use of manuals with ready made questions and answers in them.

He pours scorn on unnamed writers (presumably contemporary with the date of his book in the late 1940s) who described the mass persecutions in Europe as a creation of the church, because he points to instances of devil worship in Roman times and other earlier civilisations. But he disingenuously ignores the point that when the church became dominant, it labelled all pagan gods and spirits as devils, thus converting pagan beliefs into devil worship. This was followed by the persecution of heretics - anyone with doctrinal differences from the Catholic church - which eventually morphed into the persecution of witches when the latter became equated with heretics, as it did in most countries apart from England. The only writers he finds fault with and actually names, are the brave sceptics, such as Reginald Scot, who wrote in the 16th and 17th centuries about the fallacies around witchcraft beliefs, and the injustice of persecuting innocent people who were for the most part, poor and old. Such writers were, of course, long dead even at the time of writing and hence unable to sue him for libel. But the only half-hearted charge he can make against Scot is to imply that he was an agnostic, which was not the case. Scot was willing to concede the existence of magic and witchcraft - he was a citizen of his time - but just not credulous enough to believe that it was all pervasive, and who rightly attributed a lot of accusations, especially those involving apparent demonic possession, to fraud or delusion on the part of the accusers.

The author accepts without question the propaganda by the church against Christian break away groups such as the Cathars, and gives sensationalist accounts of their supposed devil worship, which entailed child sacrifice, eating of children, rampant promiscuity and so on. Ironically, these are exactly the charges levelled against the early Christians by the Roman authorities and which have been used ever since against various disadvantaged communities, such as the Jews, as well as the various Christian sects throughout history which disagreed with the mainstream Catholic church. Far from being Satanists, the Cathars etc were followers of Christ but disagreed with the mainstream church on major doctrinal points. The book also has a slight anti-Semitic tone in places when describing instances of Jewish magicians-devil worshippers.

The author does not serve the reader well by treating the various types of magic such as divination, necromancy, scrying (far seeing), astrology and maleficium (magic used to harm people or animals), as all being witchcraft and/or devil worship. This ignores the fact that certain magics were associated with particular groups of people - for example, those who drew up magic circles and evoked demons using grimoires (spell books) or invoked spirits of the dead were generally educated and often wealthy men, who can be termed sorcerers. Most magic-working among the common people was folk magic, consisting of charms, potions, poultices and so on, or scrying to locate lost objects etc. There had long been tolerance for "white" witches, otherwise known as cunning folk or wise women/men, who provided medical treatment, located lost objects and helped people who thought they were bewitched to identify the perpetrator. Often their charms and cures were associated with Christian prayers. Such people were subjected to very minor penalties when the church bothered with them at all, even till the middle ages, but with the Reformation and the tensions between the original church, those who tried to reform it from within, and the emergent Protestant faiths, such people became swept up in witch persecutions. The author however follows the line in viewing them all as devil worshipping witches.

Similarly, the book has a sensationalist approach to aspects of the standard charge of witchcraft, as it came to be used in Europe. There is no appreciation that features such as the pact with the devil and the witches sabbat only gradually developed around the 16th century, then gained ascendancy in European thinking about witchcraft, but were much less influential in England until late in the period of persecution. These ideas were common among the educated classes who were exposed directly to them in such books as Malleus Maleficarum, and in time just the assumption of a pact with the devil was enough to condemn someone to death, irrespective of whether they had actually hurt people or animals, or damaged crops etc. Ordinary folk were much more focused on the possible harm that witches might do, rather than their religious beliefs. But the author believes in all these constructs literally, and states that people really did fly through the air or teleport to sabbats, took part in orgies with real devils, and changed form into animals.

In keeping with the paranoid tone, the author declares several times that Satanists were responsible for countless historical upheavals, such as the French Revolution, and that they were working harder than ever in the present day. As the book was published in 1946, it seems likely that the oblique mentions of current terrible events imply that he ascribes the entirety of WWII and the Holocaust etc to witches and Satanists. He informs the reader that witches constantly engage in a worldwide conspiracy to destroy civilisation, and deplores the general scepticism about witchcraft which set in during the 18th century.

All in all, this book is a precursor to the conspiracy theories found on areas of social media today. Unfortunately it is not possible to award zero stars so this will have to be a one star rating.