Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

Occultism flourished among the Britons under
Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. In 1597 King
James VI published an authoritative
Demonologie, which is one of the horrors of
literature. He ascribed to witches the power to
haunt houses, to make men and women love
or hate, to transfer disease from one person to
another, to kill by roasting a wax effigy, and to
raise devastating storms; and he advocated the
death penalty for all witches and magicians,
and even for their customers. When a tempest
nearly wrecked him on his return from
Denmark with his bride, he caused four
suspects to be tortured into confessing that
they had plotted to destroy him by magic
means; and one of them, John Fain, after the
most barbarous torments, was burned to death
(1590)….. In this matter the Kirk agreed with
the King, and lay magistrates lenient to witches
were threatened with excommunication.
Between 1560 and 1600 some eight thousand
women were burned as witches in a Scotland
having hardly a million souls (Durant,
1961:162).
The great variety of animistic practices were never fully vanquished from the continent
as is so often claimed, a critical truth that still concerns us today, and is more fully
developed later. Even the fierceness of the Inquisition could not remove these pre-
Christian beliefs and practices. Christianized culture -- or Christendom -- became a
cultural veneer that merely drove animistic beliefs below the surface, as it were. Will
Durant -- not always kind to Christianity -- comments:
Religions are born and may die, but
superstition is immortal. Only the fortunate
can take life without mythology. Most of us
suffer in body and soul, and nature’s subtlest
anodyne is a dose of the supernatural. Even
Kepler and Newton mingled their science
with mythology: Kepler believed in
witchcraft, and Newton wrote less on science
than on the Apocalypse (Durant, 1961:575).
The historical record discloses that Copernicus advanced the heliocentric theory first,
but did not have Galileo’s boldness, fearing as much the mockery of fellow academics as
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University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa