Europe's inner demons

In recent years various attempts have been made, above all in the United States, to adopt a psycho-analytical approach to the material of history; but these attempts have been largely confined to interpreting the behaviour and personalities of dead individuals. There is another possibility. I believe, and have believed for the last thirty years, that in so far as the insights of psycho-analysis can be brought to bear on history at all, collective fantasies or (in the widest sense of the term) social myths constitute the most fruitful field for their application.⁽¹⁾

In this admittedly speculative postscript I propose to apply them, with all due tentativeness, to the collective fantasy with which we are concerned.

For what we have been examining is above all a fantasy at work in history (and incidentally, in the writing of history). It is fantasy, and nothing else, that provides the continuity in this story. Gatherings where babies or small children are ceremonially stabbed or squeezed to death, their blood drunk, their flesh devoured — or else incinerated for consumption later — belong to the world of fantasy. Orgies where one mates with one’s neighbour in the dark, without troubling to establish whether that neighbour is male or female, a stranger or, on the contrary, one’s own father or mother, son or daughter, belong to the world of fantasy. And so does the Devil or subordinate demon who, in the guise of a monstrous tom-cat or goat-man, presides over and participates in some of these performances. Human collectivities, large and small, certainly are capable of grotesque and monstrous deeds — no century has proved it more abundantly than our own. Nevertheless, there is no good reason to think that these particular things ever happened: we have examined case after case, and have found hardly any where the accusation did not include manifestly impossible features.

The fantasy was not of equal importance, nor did it fulfil the same functions, at all stages in the long and complex story. Against the Christians of Lyons in the second century, and again against the Knights Templars in the fourteenth it was cynically and consciously exploited to legitimate an exterminatory policy which had already been decided on. When amateur inquisitors of fanatical disposition — men such as Conrad of Marburg, Alberto Cattaneo, John of Capestrano — wove them into the charges against the Waldensians or the Fraticelli, the effect was to intensify the persecution of a group that was already marked out for persecution. The great witch-hunt, on the other hand, never would have occurred at all but for the fantasy of a child-eating. orgiastic, Devil-worshipping sect. Admittedly, at that point other beliefs clustered around the central fantasy — beliefs about maleficium

, about ritual magic, about witches who flew by night, about pacts, about incubi. But the witch-hunt reached massive dimensions only where the minds of the authorities were obsessed by the central fantasy itself. In the great witch-hunt that fantasy became, as it were, an autonomous force. The law was re-shaped to take account of it: in the form of the witches’ sabbat it became the core of a new offence, the crimen magiae

. And on the charge of committing that imaginary offence, many thousands of human beings were burned alive.

This book has told, in detail, the story of how the fantasy operated over a lengthy period of European history. It has tried to describe the complex process of social interaction by which, with the passage of time, the fantasy became standardized and sanctified, a matter of consensus. But it is also natural to ask just where the fascination of such a fantasy lay. Clearly it represents a total inversion of social norms: the acts attributed to these real or imaginary out-groups were acts which were totally forbidden, which indeed were regarded with horror, as the quintessence of everything that human beings ought not to do. But perhaps we can be rather more specific than that.

The title “Europe’s Inner Demons” is intentionally ambiguous. It suggests, of course, that the groups which were demonized did not consist of inhabitants of distant countries but lived — or, in the case of the witches, were imagined as living — in the heart of Europe itself. But it is also meant to convey that for many Europeans these groups came to embody part of their innermost selves — their obsessive fears, and also their unacknowledged, terrifying desires. The nature of these endopsychic demons is indicated by the specific accusations brought against the demonized groups. Certain accusations have recurred again and again in the course of our story. Their meaning may become clearer when they are viewed in a broader context.