Many of the female saints of the early church behaved in ways that in a different setting would have brought an accusation of witchcraft. Many had relationships with birds and beasts identical to those that witches were thought to have. The seventh-century saint Melangell, for example, sheltered a hare beneath her skirts as she knelt praying in a wood and when the following hounds caught up they fell back whining; later, witches would be thought to inhabit the bodies of hares.

Image Credit... Christopher Silas Neal

Moreover, Demos is ill equipped to ­explain why it is that the most frightful witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries occurred in Protestant Europe, where the authority of the papacy had been rejected and minority sects and millennial cults were springing up everywhere. He disposes of the most diligent witch hunters in Europe in a few brief synoptic paragraphs that add little to our understanding of why 9 million — or was it 50,000? — people were tried as witches between 1550 and 1700.

It is still a sin for a Catholic to consult a witch or a necromancer, but under Catholicism there was no systematic attempt to drive such practitioners out of the community. Even on the eve of a great witch hunt the merry wives of Shakespeare’s Windsor occasionally availed themselves of the services of the Witch of Brentford, who had nothing worse to fear than being beaten out of the house by an angry husband. In much of the Western world witches and witchcraft are as much a part of the regular business of life as they were in premodern times. In rural Italy to this day a woman who suspects her husband of infidelity will consult a strega, who will give her a fascino, a charm to stop him from straying. In 2003 the charismatic life coach Carole Caplin was described as having “cast a spell” over the better educated wife of the British prime minister. In hanging Caplan’s “magic crystals” round her neck Cherie Blair was probably a victim of false science rather than guilty of superstition, but in its early days experimental science too was heresy. Women’s magazines now run page after page of advertisements for fortunetellers and other charlatans, who exploit with impunity the gullibility of their readership.

Demos’s account of the travels of the “Malleus Maleficarum,” the “Hammer of Witches,” compiled by Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger and first published in Latin in Strasbourg in 1487, with many more Latin editions in 40 years, is marred by his own faith in text as authority. Early printings are a strange selection of texts partly because of the vicissitudes of financing book production; “Malleus Maleficarum” is a pretty good example of a book that every institution had to own, rather than a book everyone wanted to read. Demos might have been inspired to reconsider if he had known a little more about the “eccentric Catholic intellectual” Montague Summers, who revived it in 1928.

In the last portion of “The Enemy Within” Demos includes a series of brief essays on American witch hunts — the various anti-Masonry scares, the persecution of the Bavarian Illuminati, the anarchists following the Haymarket riot, the different Red scares and McCarthyism, and the child sex-abuse panic. The discussion of all of these is brief and superficial. Demos keeps asking himself whether these episodes could be correctly described as witch hunts, which of course they can. The real question is whether what happened in Salem in 1692 is an aspect of the same process. No witch-finder general orchestrated the events in New England. Demos includes an overview of contemporary interpretations of “what happened at Salem” under 20 headings, an ideal format for undergraduate course notes but hardly suitable for a book.