Chapter 7: The Demon Haunted World

"There are demon haunted worlds, regions of utter darkness."~The Isa Upanishad

     From the beginning, much more was intended than demons as a ere poetic metaphor for the evil in the hearts of men. With exhaustive citations of scripture and of ancient and modern scholars, they produced the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches - aptly described as on of the most terrifying documents in human history. What the Malleus comes down to is that if you are accused of witchcraft, you are a witch. Torture is n unfailing means to demonstrate the validity of the accusation.There is no opportunity to confront the accusers. Little attention is given to the possibility that accusations might be made for impious purposes.
     The more who, under torture, confessed to witchcraft, the harder it was to maintain that the whole business was mere fantasy. Since each "witch" was made to implicate others, the numbers grew exponentially. These constituted "frightful proofs that the Devil is still alive," as it was later put in America in the Salem Witch Trials.
     In Britain witch-finders, also called prickers, were employed, receiving a handsome bounty for each girl or woman they turned over for execution. They had no incentive to be cautious in their accusations. Typically they looked for devils marks- scars or birthmarks or nevi- that when pricked with a pin neither hurt nor bled. In the witch trials, mitigating evidence or defence witnesses were inadmissible. In any case, it was nearly impossible to provide compelling alibis for accused witches: The rules of evidence had a special character.
     The confessions of witchcraft could not be based on hallucinations, say, or desperate attempts to satisfy the inquisitors and stop the torture.Witchcraft of course was not the only offense that merited torture and burning at the stake. Heresy was a still more serous crime, and both Catholics and Protestants punished it ruthlessly. Burning witches is a feature of Western civilization that has, with occasional political exceptions, declined since the sixteenth century. In our time, withes,= and djinns are found as regular fare in children's entertainment, exorcism of demons is still practiced by the Roman Catholic and, other churches, and the proponents of one cult still denounce as sorcery the cultic practices of another.  More than half of Americans tell pollsters they "believe" in the Devil's existence and 10 percent have communicated with him, as Martin Luther reported he did regularly.
     There are no spaceships in the stories pertaining to with craft. But most of the central elements for the alien abducting account are present including sexually obsessive non humans who live in the sky and walk through walls. Unless we believe that demons really exist, how can we understand so strange a belief system? Is there any real alternative besides a shared delusion based on common brain wiring and chemistry?