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Daemonologie—in full Dæmonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue, Divided into three Books: By the High and Mightie Prince, James &c.—was first published in 1597 [1] by King James VI of Scotland (later also James I of England) as a philosophical dissertation on contemporary necromancy and the historical relationships between the various methods of divination used from ancient black magic.
The book claims that "the nobility of their nature causes certain demons to balk at committing certain actions and filthy deeds." [ 99 ] Though the work never gives a list of names or types of demons, like some demonological texts or spellbooks of the era, such as the Liber Juratus , it does indicate different types of demons.
Bishop Antonio Venegas de Figueroa (1540) cautioned against confusing witchcraft with mental illness. [22] When French surgeon Pierre Pigray (1589) was asked by the Parliament to examine several people accused of being witches, [23] he dismissed the allegations on the basis that the accused were deluded and in need of medical care. [24]
De praestigiis daemonum, translated as On the Tricks of Demons, [1] is a book by medical doctor Johann Weyer, also known as Wier, first published in Basel in 1563. [ 2 ] [ 3 ] The book argues that witchcraft does not exist and that those who claim to practice it are suffering from delusions, which should be treated as mental illnesses, rather ...
Within the historical phenomenon, witch trial 'defendants' were overwhelmingly female, and members of the lower classes. The Salem witch trial breaks from this pattern. In the Salem witch trials, elite men were accused of witchcraft, some of them the same leaders who failed to successfully protect besieged settlements to the north. This anomaly ...
Usually, accusations of witchcraft were made by neighbors of accused witches, and followed from social tensions. Witches were sometimes said to have communed with demons or with the Devil , though anthropologist Jean La Fontaine notes that such accusations were mainly made against perceived "enemies of the Church". [ 7 ]
Throughout the medieval era, mainstream Christian doctrine had denied the belief in the existence of witches and witchcraft, condemning it as a pagan superstition. [14] Some have argued that the work of the Dominican Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century helped lay the groundwork for a shift in Christian doctrine, by which certain Christian theologians eventually began to accept the possibility ...
Hutton and Davies note that folk healers were sometimes accused of witchcraft, but made up a minority of the accused. [31] [22] It is also possible that a small proportion of accused witches may have genuinely sought to harm by magical means. [32] Éva Pócs writes that reasons for accusations of witchcraft fall into four general categories: [6]