Europe's inner demons

Norman Cohn • Europe’s Inner Demons

Europe’s Inner Demons

An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt

NORMAN COHN

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Car c’est à la vérité une violente et traistresse maistresse d’escole, que la coustume. Elle establit en nous, peu à peu, à la desrobée, le pied de son autorité: mais par ce doux et humble commencement, l’ayant rassis et planté avec l’ayde du temps, elle nous descouvre tantost un furieux et tyrannique visage, contrc lequel nous n’avons plus la liberté de hausser seulement les yeux.

Michel de Montaigne, Essais, Livre premier, chapitre xxii

For truly, Custome is a violent and deceiving schoole-mistris. She by little and little, and as it were by stealth, establisheth the foot of her authoritie in us; by which mild and gentle beginning, if once by the aid of time, it have settled and planted the same in us, it will soone discover a furious and tyrannical countenance unto us, against which we have no more the libertie to lift so much as our eies.

John Florio’s translation, 1603

ILLUSTRATIONS

between pages 256 and 257

1. “Waldensians” adoring the Devil in the form of a he-goat. From a manuscript of a French translation of a Latin tract or sermon by Johannis Tinctoris, Contra sectam Valdensium. Copyright Bibliotheque royale Albert I^er, Brussels (MS 11209, folio 3 recto). Date about 1460.

2. The witches’ sabbat as imagined at the height of the great witch-hunt. From Pierre de Lancre’s Tableau de l’Inconstance des mauvais anges, second edition, Paris, 1613.

3. Goya: Capricho No. 71, with the caption: “Si amanece, nos vamos” (“When day dawns, we have to go”).

4. Goya: Painting of witches, often known as El aquelarre (The witches’ sabbat), in the Museo de la Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid.

5. Goya, Painting of witches, often known as El hechizo (The bewitching), in the Museo de la Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid.

6. Goya: Capricho No. 45, with the caption: “Mucho hay que chupar” (“There’s plenty to nibble at”).

7. Goya: Saturn devouring one of his sons, in the Prado, Madrid.

8. Rubens: Saturn devouring one of his sons, in the Prado, Madrid. Reproduced from the Mansell Collection, London.

EDITORIAL FOREWORD

Following a proposal originally advanced by Mr David Astor, a research centre was set up in the University of Sussex in 1966 to investigate how persecutions and exterminations come about; how the impulse to persecute or exterminate is generated, how it spreads, and under what conditions it is likely to express itself in action. The Centre was originally called the Centre for Research in Collective Psychopathology, but later adopted the more neutral name of the Columbus Centre, after the Trust which finances it.

The Centre’s work has now resulted in a series of books and monographs on subjects ranging from the roots of European nationalism and racism to the fate of the Gypsies as a minority, from the causes of the persecution of “witches” to the causes of the exterminations carried out under the Third Reich, and from the biological to the psychological roots of the very urge to persecute or to exterminate.