Review: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Volume 2

Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Volume 2 by Charles Mackay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME.

THE CRUSADES ..."

Mackay here revels in the criminalistic excess and folly of the crusades. Largely they became a visitation of hell onto Eastern Europe resulting from the exportation of holy warriors from Western Europe. Over the decades, the infidels of the Holy Land actually by and large were more equitable and reasonable combatants than the inharmonious and superstitions Christians.

THE WITCH MANIA

Writing from 1840, Mackay looks back on the persecutions of witches with a dim view and easily debunks the holocaust largely against women and girls. Herein is also evidence of a touch of the Herodotus in the credulous Mackay. Of the death of self-described Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins, Mackay says,

"It is consoling to think that this impostor perished in his own snare. Mr. Gaul's exposure and his own rapacity weakened his influence among the magistrates; and the populace, who began to find that not even the most virtuous and innocent were secure from his persecution, looked upon him with undisguised aversion. He was beset by a mob, at a village in Suffolk, and accused of being himself a wizard. An old reproach was brought against him, that he had, by means of sorcery, cheated the devil out of a certain memorandum-book, in which he, Satan, had entered the names of all the witches in England. "Thus," said the populace, "you find out witches, not by God's aid, but by the devil's." In vain he denied his guilt. The populace longed to put him to his own test. He was speedily stripped, and his thumbs and toes tied together. He was then placed in a blanket, and cast into a pond. Some say that he floated; and that he was taken out, tried, and executed upon no other proof of his guilt. Others assert that he was drowned. This much is positive, that there was an end of him. As no judicial entry of his trial and execution is to be found in any register, it appears most probable that he expired by the hands of the mob."

Mackay is not alone in the belief of this ignominious end as the tale is in The Miscellaneous Works of Sir Walter Scott. But, according to more recent scholarship like Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy, Matthew Hopkins died at his home in Manningtree, Essex, on 12 August 1647, probably of pleural tuberculosis. He was buried a few hours after his death in the graveyard of the Church of St Mary at Mistley Heath.

THE SLOW POISONERS

I have been looking forward to reading this since I interviewed Andrew Goldfarb of the band The Slow Poisoners some years ago and learned of the inspiration for the group's name. In Mackay's sensationalist reportage (today he would have had a cable TV series like Forensic Files or Ghost Hunters), this is a vivid depiction of a homicide spree of active patience.

HAUNTED HOUSES

This seems more a continuation of THE WITCH MANIA in the belief in the supernatural, pranksterism, etc. Some of the unveiling, like servants mocking as poltergeists by using long horse hairs to ring down china, reads like the denouement of a Scooby-Doo episode.

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