Witchcraft of course was not the only offence that merited torture and burning at the stake. Heresy was a still more serious crime, and both Catholics and Protestants punished it ruthlessly. In the sixteenth century the scholar William Tyndale had the temerity to contemplate translating the New Testament into English. But if people could actually read the Bible in their own language instead of arcane Latin, they could form their own, independent religious views. They might conceive of their own private unintermediated line to God. This was a challenge to the job security of Roman Catholic priests. When Tyndale tried to publish his translation, he was hounded and pursued all over Europe. Eventually he was captured, garrotted, and then, for good measure, burned at the stake. His copies of the New Testament (which a century later became the basis of the exquisite King James translation) were then hunted down house-to-house by armed posses – Christians piously defending Christianity by preventing other Christians from knowing the words of Christ. Such a cast of mind, such a climate of absolute confidence that knowledge should be rewarded by torture and death were unlikely to help those accused of witchcraft.
Burning witches is a feature of Western civilization that has, with occasional political exceptions, declined since the sixteenth century. In the last judicial execution of witches in England, a woman and her nine-year-old daughter were hanged. Their crime was raising a rain storm by taking their stockings off. In our time, witches and djinns are found as regular fare in children’s entertainment, exorcism of demons is still practised by the Roman Catholic and other Churches, and the proponents of one cult still denounce as sorcery the cultic practices of another. We still use the word ‘pandemonium’ (literally, all demons). A crazed and violent person is still said to be demonic. (Not until the eighteenth century was mental illness no longer generally ascribed to supernatural causes; even insomnia had been considered a punishment inflicted by demons.) More than half of Americans tell pollsters they ‘believe’ in the Devil’s existence, and ten per cent have communicated with him, as Martin Luther reported he did regularly. In a 1992 ‘spiritual warfare manual’ called Prepare for War, Rebecca Brown informs us that abortion and sex outside of marriage ‘will almost always result in demonic infestation’; that meditation, yoga and martial arts are designed so unsuspecting Christians will be seduced into worshipping demons; and that ‘rock music didn’t “just happen”, it was a carefully masterminded plan by none other than Satan himself. Sometimes ‘your loved ones are demonically bound and blinded’. Demonology is today still part and parcel of many earnest faiths.
And what is it that demons do? In the Malleus, Kramer and Sprenger reveal that ‘devils . . . busy themselves by interfering with the process of normal copulation and conception, by obtaining human semen, and themselves transferring it’. Demonic artificial insemination in the Middle Ages goes back at least to St Thomas Aquinas, who tells us in On the Trinity that ‘demons can transfer the semen which they have collected and inject it into the bodies of others’. His contemporary, St Bonaventura, spells it out in a little more detail: succubi ‘yield to males and receive their semen; by cunning skills, the demons preserve its potency, and afterwards, with the permission of God, they become incubi and pour it out into female repositories’. The products of these demon-mediated unions are also, when they grow up, visited by demons. A multi-generational trans-species sexual bond is forged. And these creatures, we recall, are well known to fly; indeed they inhabit the upper air.
There is no spaceship in these stories. But most of the central elements of the alien abduction account are present, including sexually obsessive non-humans who live in the sky, walk through walls, communicate telepathically, and perform breeding experiments on the human species. Unless we believe that demons really exist, how can we understand so strange a belief-system, embraced by the whole Western world (including those considered the wisest among us), reinforced by personal experience in every generation, and taught by Church and State? Is there any real alternative besides a shared delusion based on common brain wiring and chemistry?
In Genesis we read of angels who couple with ‘the daughters of men’. The culture myths of ancient Greece and Rome told of gods appearing to women as bulls or swans or showers of gold and impregnating them. In one early Christian tradition, philosophy derived not from human ingenuity but out of demonic pillow talk, the fallen angels betraying the secrets of Heaven to their human consorts. Accounts with similar elements appear in cultures around the world. Parallels to incubi include Arabian djinn, Greek satyrs, Hindu bhuts, Samoan hotua poro, Celtic dusii and many others. In an epoch of demon hysteria, it was easy enough to demonize those we feared or hated. So Merlin was said to have been fathered by an incubus. So were Plato, Alexander the Great, Augustus and Martin Luther. Occasionally an entire people – for example the Huns or the inhabitants of Cyprus – were accused by their enemies of having been sired by demons.
In Talmudic tradition the archetypical succubus was Lilith, whom God made from the dust along with Adam. She was expelled from Eden for insubordination – not to God, but to Adam. Ever since, she spends her nights seducing Adam’s descendants. In ancient Iranian and many other cultures, nocturnal seminal emissions were believed to be elicited by succubi. St Teresa of Avila reported a vivid sexual encounter with an angel -an angel of light, not of darkness, she was sure – as did other women later sanctified by the Catholic Church. Cagliostro, the eighteenth-century magician and con man, let it be understood that he, like Jesus of Nazareth, was a product of the union ‘between the children of heaven and earth’.
In 1645 a Cornish teenager, Anne Jefferies, was found groggy, crumpled on the floor. Much later, she recalled being attacked by half a dozen little men, carried paralysed to a castle in the air, seduced and returned home. She called the little men fairies. (For many pious Christians, as for the inquisitors of Joan of Arc, this was a distinction without a difference. Fairies were demons, plain and simple.) They returned to terrify and torment her. The next year she was arrested for witchcraft. Fairies traditionally have magical powers and can cause paralysis by the merest touch. The ordinary passage of time is slowed in fairyland. Fairies are reproductively impaired, so they have sex with humans and carry off babies from their cradles, sometimes leaving a fairy substitute, a ‘changeling’. Now it seems a fair question: if Anne Jefferies had grown up in a culture touting aliens rather than fairies, and UFOs rather than castles in the air, would her story have been distinguishable in any significant respect from the ones ‘abductees’ tell?
In his 1982 book The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions, David Hufford describes an executive, university-educated, in his mid-thirties, who recalled a summer spent as a teenager in his aunt’s house. One night, he saw mysterious lights moving in the harbour. Afterwards, he fell asleep. From his bed he then witnessed a white, glowing figure climbing the stairs. She entered his room, paused, and then said – anticlimactically, it seems to me – “That is the linoleum.’ Some nights the figure was an old woman; in others, an elephant. Sometimes the young man was convinced the entire business was a dream; other times he was certain he was awake. He was pressed down into his bed, paralysed, unable to move or cry out. His heart was pounding. He was short of breath. Similar events transpired on many consecutive nights. What is happening here? These events took place before alien abductions were widely described. If the young man had known about alien abductions, would his old woman have had a large head and bigger eyes?
In several famous passages in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon described the balance between credulity and scepticism in late classical antiquity:
Credulity performed the office of faith; fanaticism was permitted to assume the language of inspiration, and the effects of accident or contrivance were ascribed to supernatural causes . . .
In modern times [Gibbon is writing in the middle eighteenth century], a latent and even involuntary scepticism adheres to the most pious dispositions. Their admission of supernatural truths is much less an active consent than a cold and passive acquiescence. Accustomed long since to observe and to respect the invariable order of Nature, our reason, or at least our imagination, is not sufficiently prepared to sustain the visible action of the Deity. But in the first ages of Christianity the situation of mankind was extremely different. The most curious, or the most credulous, among the pagans were often persuaded to enter into a society which asserted an actual claim of miraculous powers. The primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary events. They felt, or they fancied, that on every side they were incessantly assaulted by daemons, comforted by visions, instructed by prophecy, and surprisingly delivered from danger, sickness, and from death itself, by the supplications of the church . . .