Montague Summers, “The History of Witchcraft and Demonology”

The Devil was real, the witch trials were justified, and modern spiritualism is his newest disguise: the most controversial history of witchcraft ever written by someone who believed every word of it.

Was the witch of early modern Europe a harmless victim of mass hysteria — or something far more dangerous? In 1926, while most historians were busy explaining away three centuries of witch trials as superstition and persecution, the Rev. Montague Summers set out to prove the opposite: that the witch was a real heretic, in real league with a real Devil, and that the Inquisitors who burned her had, in the main, gotten it right.

Drawing on an extraordinary command of primary sources — trial records, eyewitness pamphlets, and the dense Latin treatises of the demonologists themselves — Summers builds his case chapter by chapter: the theology of the diabolic pact, the iconography of demons and familiars, the notorious witches’ Sabbat, scriptural evidence for sorcery, and, most strikingly, a direct line drawn from the possessed of the seventeenth century to the séance rooms of Summers’s own spiritualist-obsessed 1920s.

Summers himself remains one of the strangest figures in English letters: a self-styled Catholic priest of disputed ordination, a respected scholar of Restoration drama by day, and by night the century’s most flamboyant and convinced chronicler of witches, vampires, and werewolves — a man who dressed the part in cassock and cloak and never once doubted that the darkness he studied was real.

Whether read as history, as theology, or as one of the last great defences of a vanished worldview, this remains an essential, if deliberately partisan, document — republished here in its complete original 1926 text, spelling and all.

Mysteria: Horror|Weird|Supernatural