As Demos observes, in antiquity it was the Christians who were accused of cannibalism (thanks to the metaphor of carnal sacrifice in the Mass) and black magic in early Lyons, France, good polytheists dragged Christians professed and suspected from their homes and administered frontier justice accordingly. This more synthetic account examines the European roots of that episode while acknowledging that there is scarcely a culture anywhere that does not have a category of person who believes that he or she is especially attuned to the otherworld and able to manipulate it-and some category of person whose sworn duty it is to oppose such interventions. Circles and Lines, 2004, etc.) recalls a bout in graduate school with the witch hunts at Salem and elsewhere, which led to an early monograph. Of Satan’s imps, wasting sicknesses and mass hysteria: a careful account of the occult and its discontents from ancient days to the present.īest known as a chronicler of the colonial era, Demos (History/Yale Univ.
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