In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton

Slipping this in a little late for a Sunday. I have a few other books I could add to my review list of other books on witchcraft, though I don’t happen to have any of them to hand at the moment. Possible notes for a future set of reviews, once I clear out a bit more of my existing backlog.

In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton

Mention ‘Salem’ nowadays, and the first thing that tends to come to mind is ‘witchcraft’. In the early months of 1692 (actually the later months of 1691, by the old Julian calendar), a small group of girls and young women in the Massachusetts Bay Colony settlement at Salem Village fell ill with a number of strange ailments. When the local physician was called in to look at them, he speculated that the illnesses were not natural and might have been caused by bewitchment…a diagnosis that was later to prove fatal for the 14 women and 5 men who would be hanged for maleficium, the practice of diabolic magic intended to bring harm to others. Several other accused witches died in prison without ever coming to trial, dozens of men and women (and even children as young as four or five) were arrested or fled the colony to avoid arrest, and still more bowed to outside pressure and confessed to being witches, implicating neighbours and family members in the process. Not even the wealthy and powerful of the colony were completely immune to being ‘cried out on’ as witches, a most unusual circumstance in the days when the most commonly accepted profile of a possible witch was a poor to middling older woman who had neither the friends nor the financial wherewithal to preserve her good name. The Salem outbreak was the largest of its kind in New England, and the records kept on the accusations and trials have been relatively well-preserved, making the study of the Salem witchcraft cases both popular and constantly open to new, revisionist perspectives — most of which attempt to make sense of why a few random accusations spread into a full-on outbreak.

Mary Beth Norton approaches the trials from a slightly different angle than previous works. Most books about the trials tend to focus on social aspects of the accusers, the accused and the accusations; why certain people were accused and others not, why certain people confessed or refused to confess, why the most powerful people in the colony were so willing to believe that Satan could be thoroughly bent on the destruction of the Massachusetts colony. Norton’s premise is less centred on social history than it is on politicial and military history. She argues that the Salem witch-trials cannot be studied without extensive reference to the ongoing wars between the settlers and the Indian population of New England, particularly the Wabanaki tribe of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In her closely-argued book, she draws connections between the Indian wars and the effect the wars had on many of the key players in the trials. The connections might be a little hard to follow (or credit) at first, but as Norton lays out and piles up the evidence, her conclusions seem very reasonable. What’s more, they take social history to a new level by showing how closely-knit the communities of settlers were, and how children and younger adults were often easily manipulated to settle long-standing grudges between their elders.

One important caveat, first and foremost: To get the most out of Norton’s research, it helps to have at least a passing familiarity with some of the primary participants in the Salem witch trials. Anyone who has read or seen Arthur Miller’s The Crucible will know of condemned witches John and Elizabeth Proctor, Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey, as well as the awful death of Martha’s husband Giles Corey, who refused to consent to a trial and was pressed to death with heavy weights in accordance with current English law. The names of Abigail Williams, Ann Puttnam and Mercy Lewis — three of the ‘afflicted girls’ — also appear frequently in the text, for they and their relatives were instrumental in the spread of accusations. There are several good general books on the trials that would work as an introduction, and reading one or two of those before looking at Norton’s work is likely to make Norton’s analysis and conclusions a good deal easier to follow. (I consider myself fairly well-acquainted with the standard literature on the trials, and I still had to stop and go back in a few places to ensure that I hadn’t missed something crucial in Norton’s dense narrative.)

That said, Norton’s book is a superb addition to the existing literature, exploring a side of the trials that has only been vaguely considered in the past. Granted, there are times when some of her arguments seem a little too tenuous, and she has a habit of making conjectures which she feels are warranted but which I feel make for awkward reading. But In the Devil’s Snare is one of the better books available about the Salem outbreak and the history of witchcraft in colonial New England, if nothing else for the extensive footnotes and solid historiography that underpins the text.

C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces (edited by Lesley Walmsley)

Since the book is so large, there really isn’t a good way to review all of its contents without going on for pages. More’s the pity, in a way.

C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces (edited by Lesley Walmsley)

Clocking in at just over 1000 pages, this fairly impressive tome represents just about all of C.S. Lewis’s religious essays and sermons, various short academic pieces, and other stories and story fragments. The Amazon.co.uk review of this edition lists the writings that were not included in this book, and it is disappointing to know that so far it is still not possible to obtain a complete collection of Lewis’s writings — not in the same way that it is theoretically possible to obtain the full twenty-volume set of George Orwell’s books, essays, journalistic works and letters (edited by Peter Davison), for example. But now that the third and final volume of Lewis’s collected letters has been released, it’s worth mentioning this essay collection as a fairly useful attempt at compiling many writings that have been scattered across a number of different books and their reorganised reprints.

The essay collection is organised in eleven sections by general topic: ‘Aspects of Faith’, ‘English and Literature’, ‘The Art of Writing and the Gifts of Writers’, ‘Letters’, and others. There’s a section devoted to several of Lewis’s short stories, including the manuscript pages of ‘The Dark Tower’, an unfinished science-fiction/fantasy piece featuring Edwin Ransom of Lewis’s Space Trilogy. I found the section on writing and other writers quite interesting, because it includes Lewis’s thoughts on the work of his contemporaries — J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, for instance, as well as short pieces about George Orwell, Dorothy L. Sayers and Charles Williams. Lewis’s poems ought to have been included as well; it isn’t as if they would take up that much more room, and they would have been a welcome addition to this collection. But for the most part, the essay collection serves as an impressive display of Lewis’s prolific output over the years.

Anyone who is interested in looking for a nice solid edition of the general bulk of Lewis’s non-fiction and collected shorter fiction works would welcome this volume. It is by no means fully comprehensive, as mentioned above, but it is certainly more comprehensive than just about any other edition currently available on the market. And because Lewis’s writings have been printed and reprinted and shuffled between new compilations over the years, it’s nice to have the better part of his writings available in one hefty volume — at least, until someone actually does us all the favour of producing a more complete compilation.

Witchcraft in Europe 400-1700: A Documentary History (2nd ed.), edited by Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters

One of my side interests in history is the history of witchcraft persecutions in Europe and North America. I have a few other books that I may end up re-reading and reviewing, but at the moment they don’t quite justify a separate category for this blog. Perhaps they will, one day.

Witchcraft in Europe 400-1700: A Documentary History (2nd ed.), edited by Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters

The first edition of Witchcraft in Europe was a collection of translated primary sources dating from A.D. 1100 to 1600, the span of time which saw the rise of executions for heresy and witchcraft by Europe’s church-based inquisitors and secular authorities. The second edition greatly expands on the first one, including not only new documents from a wider range of sources but also relevant bibliographical citations from contemporary historical scholarship on the witch-craze. And the result is a very hefty volume, chock-full of snippets from both religious and secular authors — all of which form an interesting picture of how the ‘authorities’ regarded the strange phenomenon of ordinary men and women who appeared to be in league with the Devil.

The texts one might expect to find in a book like this are, of course, included. There is a long set of passages from Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), one of the ‘classic’ instructional texts used by the authorities who presided over the trials. Other familiar works, like Cotton Mather’s ‘A Discourse on Witches’ and Nicholas Remy’s Demonaltry present contemporary opinions on witches and their practices, often in lurid detail. There are accounts of trials and confessions and executions, extensive scholarly debates on what exactly constituted ‘witchcraft’ and what distinguished witches from heretics, and several illustrations of paintings and woodblock prints that show popular conceptions of the diabolical pacts made by fallen women. Yet Witchcraft in Europe also shows the other side of the argument, with selections from works like Johann Weyer’s De praestigiis daemonum (On the Illusions of the Demons), Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft and Fredrich Spee’s Cautio criminalis, which illustrate the strong doubts and misgivings that more than a few individuals had about whether witches even existed. And conveniently, every single text in the book has a short editorial passage before it that explains the context of the text and gives some useful biographical or historical information about its author.

I know that this book is used as a base text in many university courses that spend some time discussing witchcraft, and it’s fairly easy to see why. As a comprehensive selection of texts, I can’t think of a better individual book. If Witchcraft in Europe ever goes into a third edition, I have a feeling I’ll probably end up buying it as well.

The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud

Doubling up on two of Freud’s works here. It’s quite interesting to read the full text of these works after having read bits and selections of them in various school texts over the years. (Even if some people think Freud is an utter miseryguts no matter what work of his you happen to be reading.)

The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion) in 1927, after he had spent several years considering the idea of religion from a psychoanalytic perspective. He had examined religion from a more anthropological perspective in his work Totem and Taboo (1913), looking at possible connections between the beliefs of aboriginal socities and the influence that these beliefs may have had on the construction of religious ideas in the history of human civilisation. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud turns his earlier thoughts into a more systemic study of the role of religion in human behaviour and shaping the human experience, particularly with regard to how religious belief influences and regulates human behaviour.

Freud describes religion as an ‘illusion’ — in other words, a belief that is grounded in personal wish and desire. (Illusions are not necessarily false, he points out, but they are nonetheless grounded in wish and intended to fulfil a personal need.) As Freud sees it, ‘It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.‘ He regards the illusion of religion as a creation of man’s unconscious desire for a protecting, guiding father-figure and as a social construct designed to curb the destructive instincts that would make civilised society untenable (such as cannibalism and incest). And though Freud does not advocate an absolute, wholesale jettisoning of the entire structure of the civilisation that currently rests upon a religious base, he claims that human beings are nonetheless capable of moving beyond this infantile kind of wish-fulfilment and towards a more mature and scientific understand of the universe and our place within it.

The Future of an Illusion is a very Freudian book; that is, it is very much a piece of self-analysis, a little like listening to someone who is a bit too fond of the sound of his or her own voice. He contradicts several of his own initial assertions, particularly towards the end of the book, and even someone who isn’t especially ‘religious’ (as Freud would define it) would be quick to point out Freud’s analysis is based more in his anthropological studies and his experience with psychoanalysing patients whose internal struggles with religious beliefs might have contributed to their troubled mental and emotional states. As a book, it is a very good indication of Freud’s personal opinions on religion and its role as the illusion that helps to underpin civilisation. As a treatise in favour of atheism and scientific rationalism…well, I can think of a few other authors I’d rather read on this subject. (Bertrand Russell, for one.)

Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud

The title of Sigmund Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur is a little tricky to translate idiomatically from German. A more literal translation of the title might be “The Uneasiness in Culture” or “The Discomfort in Culture”, but flipping the order of the words places more of the emphasis on the source of the uneasiness — culture, or as it might also be translated, civilisation.

Civilization and Its Discontents is Freud’s attempt to address the tensions that he sees between the instincts and impulses of the individual and the greater conformity required by civilisation. One of the most basic instincts present in human beings is aggression, an instinct that by its very nature is destabilising and impulsive and (in a word) antisocial. Coping with, controlling, or redirecting this aggressive instinct is vital to forming relationships with other human beings — indeed, doing so mitigates one of the three aspects of the human condition that Freud believes prevent individuals from being happy (the other two being exposure to the external world [i.e., weather and nature] and the fraility of the human body against aging, injury, and disease). The individual connection to this civilising force is not always very strong — as evidenced, for instance, by the number of people who will violate society’s norms if they think they can get away with it. Yet the human mind has come up with a means of internally enforcing civilisation: the power of guilt, which is controlled by an aspect of personality that Freud calls the super-ego.

According to Freud, the constant conflict between instinct and the super-ego is responsible for much of the discontent in man’s relationship to civilisation. One of the greatest societal tensions, he says, comes from civilisation’s deeply misguided commandment to ‘love your brother as you love yourself’ — a demand that not only contradicts our fundamental instincts of aggression, but also tends to be extremely difficult to put into actual practice. And when the super-ego chides us for failing to live up to these internalised expectations…well, Freud based quite a lot of his psychology on what can happen when individuals are unwilling or unable to reconcile instinct with the demands of society.

There are other side arguments in Civilization and Its Discontents, further thoughts on the often strained relationship between the individual and society. It is worth remembering that Freud wrote this book in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a time of great social instability in the wake of the Great War that would eventually lead to the series of historical events that ended with Freud fleeing his native Austria for England in mid-1938, where he died in September 1939. Even if Freud’s primarily psychological and rather pessimistic interpretation is no longer as influential as it was in his day, Civilization and Its Discontents provides a fairly concise summary of Freud’s thinking on the relationship between individual and society and the relative thinness of the veneer that provides the gloss we call modern civilisation.

The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life by Armand M. Nicholi Jr.

Today’s reviewed book ended up as a four-hour series on U.S. public television a few years ago. I don’t know if it’s been rebroadcast since then, though anyone with enough interest in seeing it should be able to purchase it without much difficulty.

The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life by Armand M. Nicholi Jr.

Harvard professor Armand Nicholi has been teaching a class about Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis for the past decade or two. In his class, he compares the lives and philosophies of the two men, focusing in particular on their very different perspectives on religion, sex, love, friendship, and other overarching questions of life. In The Question of God, Nicholi has turned his class notes into a book, one which uses Lewis and Freud’s writings to look at how these two men approached belief, disbelief, and everything in between.

Nicholi has certainly done his homework for this class. The book looks at both Freud and Lewis’s public and private writings, incorporating published works and letters in an attempt to examine how their personal philosophies shaped their attitudes towards family members, friends, colleagues, and the general public. It’s fascinating and quite insightful to see the two men’s opinions on various aspects of life laid out side by side, and Nicholi finds a number of interesting parallels between them. Both Freud and Lewis had poor relationships with their fathers and with their fathers’ ideas of religion, and suffered deep personal losses early in their childhoods that seriously affected their outlooks on life from a young age. Freud ended up rejecting religious belief entirely, and Lewis himself admits that he was essentially dragged into Christianity kicking and screaming (in a metaphysical sense). Nicholi puts together a good narrative for their stories. Yet by the end of the book, I realised that Nicholi’s thesis could be boiled down to a single sentence — ‘Freud was a depressed and depressing old chain-smoking misanthrope, and he makes Lewis (and, by extension, Lewis’s answer to the question of God) seem the very embodiment of happiness and personal fulfilment by comparison’.

Even if Nicholi tries not to sound biased towards either Lewis or Freud, the very method of his comparison paints Freud and his opinions in an almost unrelentingly dismal light. Nicholi clearly finds Lewis to be the more compelling figure of the two, and he takes pains to compare Lewis’s conversion experience with his own studies into the conversion experiences of young adults. By contrasting Lewis’s deep, long-lasting friendships and late if happy marriage with Freud’s penchant for alienating and disowning his colleagues and the puritanical froideur of his marital life…well, it is little wonder that Lewis and his philosophies on life seem to come out the better for it. Nicholi never openly says that Lewis’s world-view is the better, but from the evidence he has assembled, he doesn’t exactly need to. So even though the book is written well and seems to stem from an interesting and original premise, fans of both Lewis and Freud would be wise to read it with a skeptical eye.

The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C.S. Lewis

From a short review to a quite long one, to round out the month of October.

The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C.S. Lewis

The Discarded Image was the last book that C.S. Lewis wrote, and in essence it summarises a number of lectures and talks he gave on the subject of Medieval and Renaissance Literature — the subject he taught for the greater part of his lifetime. The ‘image’ in question is a complete and complex picture of history, science, and theology that served as the foundation for literature in the Western world from the turn of the first millennium A.D. up until around the early 1600s. In the space of a little over 200 pages, Lewis picks this intricate and detailed image apart to show the pieces that make up the whole, before putting everything back together again to point out the places where the whole contributed to how authors, historians, philosophers, and religious writers wrote about the various facets of the world they knew.

Explaining the entirety of the book would be tedious and would force me to set aside an interesting and noteworthy point. As with the majority of Lewis’s non-fiction writings, it’s very easy to see how his scholarly research and religious studies influenced the worlds he created — not just Narnia and its inhabitants, but also the planets of the Space Trilogy, the bureaucratic Hell of The Screwtape Letters, and even the twilight town and pre-dawn countryside of The Great Divorce. One quote in particular reminded me of different aspects of the fiction I’ve read:

[in a discussion of how man can have Free Will if God is omniscient]

Strictly speaking, He never foresees; He simply sees. Your ‘future’ is only an area, and only for us a special area, of His infinite Now. He sees (not remembers) your yesterday’s acts because yesterday is still ‘there’ for Him; he sees (not foresees) your tomorrow’s acts because He is already in tomorrow. As a human spectator, by watching my present act, does not at all infringe its freedom, so I am none the less free to act as I choose in the future because God, in that future (His present) watches me acting.

I’m reminded here of Aslan’s comment to Lucy in The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’: ‘I call all times soon’. But something of this is also present in Screwtape’s comments to Wormwood about the restricted ways by which tempters can influence the free will of a ‘patient’, and also (I believe) is hinted at in The Great Divorce when the spirit of George MacDonald is talking to Lewis’s Dantean avatar about choices and decisions. This is only one passage of several that illustrate ideas and thoughts that Lewis drew upon in his world-creation, or so it seemed to me when I was going through the book on my initial read-through.

Far be it from me to attribute all of Lewis’s writings to ideas covered in this particular book. Yet Lewis fans will likely find it a treat, even though it is probably best enjoyed if you have at least read Dante’s Divine Comedy and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales beforehand. I’ll end this review with a second quote from the book, one which is near the end and which rather nicely sums up the underlying structure of the book’s thesis:

It follows that the book-author unit, basic for modern criticism, must often be abandoned when we are dealing with medieval literature. Some books — if I may use a comparison I have used elsewhere — must be regarded more as we regard those cathedrals where work of many different periods is mixed and produces a total effect, admirable indeed but never foreseen nor intended by any one of the successive builders.

I’m not familiar enough with a wide spread of medieval and Renaissance literature/history/philosophy/religious writings to judge this statement on my knowledge alone. But from what I’ve read and from what others (who are far more knowledgeable about this subject than I am) have told me, Lewis was most definitely an expert in his field and his observations are spot-on.

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas

I thought my review of this was longer, but I think it says pretty much all of what I wanted to say about this very good book.

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas

Keith Thomas’s book is a classic study of the effect that the social and religious upheavals of the Reformation had on traditional folk beliefs in England — the ‘magic’ of which he speaks. Magic, in this sense, was not necessarily the magic of evil witchcraft — maleficium, as it tended to be known in those days — but rather the span of the occult and esoteric that ranges from astrology and horoscopes to Christian prayers for the sick. Any serious attempt to change or determine the course of one’s life through supernatural means would fall under Thomas’s definition of magic. This mundane kind of magic was often an integral part of daily life in pre-Reformation England, and the changes in English society that took place between 1550 and 1688 soon meant that magic, in the traditional sense, would fade into little more than the folk sayings and superstition that remain with familiar today.

Religion and the Decline of Magic is a footnote lover’s dream, with copious citations of period sources and later commentaries woven into the text. Thomas provides fascinating insights into the origins of folk sayings and prevalent myths, as well as the prominence of horoscopes and star-gazing, which were used to learn the most auspicious day to do anything from setting out on a journey to having one’s tooth pulled. As a book about the history of the English Reformation and its effects on society — leading into Oliver Cromwell’s time — Religion and the Decline of Magic presents a particularly useful sociological study. It’s a lengthy work, but worth looking into if you have any interest in the origins of folk history and the deep and abiding connections between the sacred and profane worlds.

The Portable Enlightenment Reader, edited by Isaac Kramnick

I may actually make a post that isn’t a review one of these days, but at the moment I doubt that anyone wants to read my ramblings about the Liberal Democrats’ leadership race. So I’ll set that aside for now in favour of something a little less topical.

The Portable Enlightenment Reader, edited by Isaac Kramnick

The Age of Enlightenment is a name commonly given to the philosophical and intellectual movements in Europe and in the American colonies during the eighteenth (and early seventeenth) century. A list of contributors to the ‘Enlightenment’ would have to include a remarkably diverse group of thinkers and writers who debated any number of philosophical, political, and social topics, many of whom disagreed vehemently with the writings of others. Whether it’s the pamphlets of Thomas Paine or the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot, Mary Wollstonecraft denouncing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s opinions on the education of women or Edmund Burke ‘reflecting’ on the French Revolution, Immanuel Kant’s critique of pure reason or the sheer prolific fury of just about anything written by Voltaire, the Enlightenment writers put their emphasis on reason, rational thought, scientific analysis, and the study of natural law in relation to the individual and society. The idea was to move away from irrationality and superstition (which some of these writers, though by no means all of them, attributed in part to the tyranny of organised religions) and towards a more unified framework for how the world operated. This intellectual framework helped form the basis for classical liberalism, democracy, and capitalistic thought — and by extension, formed the philosophical underpinnings of the American and French Revolutions.

The Portable Enlightenment Reader is a set of texts taken from the writings of the Enlightenment’s most notable philosophers, grouped by subject and topic and pulled together into a single volume. The texts chosen for this portable edition are, I’d have to say, a fairly good selection. All of the big names of the time period are there — Locke and Rousseau and Hume take up a decent amount of space, and the selections are usually long enough to provide a taste of the topic without taking up too much room. The idea in a book like this is to give the casual reader a sense of how each of these writers wrote and what they wrote about. For example, if you’ve ever wondered whether Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is worth reading, then the selection provided in the Portable Enlightenment Reader may give you a sense of whether you think you’d like to try to tackle his prose.

Not all of the selections are weighty philosophical treatises or explorations of history. There’s a downright smutty snippet from John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, a work of erotic fiction billed as the memoirs of a ‘woman of pleasure’ — indicative of the interest that the Enlightenment writers took in the definition, understanding, and pursuit of pleasure. There are some noteworthy perspectives on the early women’s rights movement, including a short passage written by Thomas Paine that reflects on the unfortunate state of women as he saw it. The tail end of the Enlightenment saw some consideration on the nature of the slave trade and the position of the ‘Negro race’ (as many writers called it) with respect to white Europeans. The book as a whole is meant for dabbling — a means of tempting the appetite, as it were. Now that I know where to start from, the Portable Enlightenment Reader has given me a solid basis for continuing my reading of the works of writers who helped shape Western thought at a crucial moment in Western history.

The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman

I have to admit, I picked up this book because of its title. It sounded oddly provocative, and I wanted to see if it would be a polemic thinly disgused as a historical study. (It happens far more often than you might think, believe me.)

The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman

The basic premise of Charles Freeman’s book might not go over so well with those of the Christian faith. He claims that the early Christian church played a pivotal role in stifling many of the intellectual traditions that had developed over the centuries, beginning with the ancient Greeks. The Greek gods seemed to operate at a distance from humanity, allowing the separation of faith and belief from reason and the scientific method. This degree of separation, and the Greeks’ attempts to make sense of it, gave rise to many crucial developments in mathematics, astronomy, philosophy and other rigorously intellectual disciplines. But as Christianity grew from a small cult following into a greater religious (and later political) movement, the early Christian leaders did their best to paper over the cracks in their doctrine by stifling dissent and debate, imposing a religious orthodoxy that helped to crush the practice of free and open philosophical debate that had been inherited from the Greek world. The attempt to hammer out a comprehensive religious doctrine from a mishmash of conflicting sources is the central narrative of Freeman’s book, and it’s fairly clear that while he understands why events happened as they did, he isn’t entirely happy about it.

Truthfully, I almost don’t feel qualified to pass judgement on this book. There is a lot of information here, covering nearly a millennia of history (and ancient history, at that). What is more, my knowledge of Christianity and basic Christian doctrine is general at best — and decidedly based in a nonreligious perspective. I feel as if I don’t have enough background knowledge to go through and challenge some of the points Freeman has made in his book even if I wanted to. But I did find his historical work fairly convincing, particularly with regard to the development of Christianity from its roots as an offshoot of the variations on Judaism found during the Second Temple period. I was also pleasantly surprised by his organisation and writing style, and then when I started getting into the meat of the book the sheer amount of information crammed into the pages caught me and held me fast. Fortunately for other less-informed readers such as myself, Freeman has given his audience a slew of excellent footnotes to go through and form their own conclusions. I think I may have to do some further digging on my own.

Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco

I wasn’t planning to post another Umberto Eco book review so soon, but with new material coming out on this book’s primary subject, I simply couldn’t resist.

Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco

When you’re an editor at an Italian publishing house that’s essentially a glorified vanity press specialising in occult and esoteric literature, you’re bound to read some (or rather, many) manuscripts that would be best filed under the term ‘crackpot.’ Whether the subject at hand happens to be those pesky Freemasons who keep poisoning the wells, or incontrovertible proof that the Knights Templar are alive, well, and plotting with the Soviets, the BBC, and a reincarnated Joseph of Arimathea to find the Holy Grail and take over the world…well, even conspiracy theories can get boring if you read enough of them. So three editors — an academic researcher named Causabon, an eccentric writer named Belbo, and a numerology enthusiast named Diotavelli — decide to have a little fun with what is otherwise a fairly dull job.

Their plan (which they later refer to as ‘the Plan’) is very simple. They will pull random ideas and statements from their piles of crackpot manuscripts and start to weave them together as carefully as possible. Belbo even has a computer program that is capable of shuffling the ideas around in random patterns, which the three men can then use to keep coming up with increasingly fantastical connections between seemingly unrelated incidents. The basic idea behind the Plan is to rewrite world history as one massive conspiracy theory, involving the Knights Templar and a mysterious power source greater than an entire atomic arsenal. It’s a game, and an intellectual challenge, and a way to stave off the boredom of their work. But when the Plan they create out of nowhere soon starts to take on a life of its own, the three men get increasingly caught up in the nonsensical story they’ve bashed together. And they will soon discover that there are more than a few people out there who are eager to believe in the greatest conspiracy theory of all time — and will do anything to ensure that the Plan comes to fruition.

Foucault’s Pendulum, first and foremost, isn’t a reference to philosopher Michel Foucault. It’s a reference to the physics experiment designed by French physicist Léon Foucault; specifically, the one located at the Musée des arts et métiers in Paris. That said, the book does for the suspense thriller what Eco’s The Name of the Rose did for the period detective story: it faithfully follows all of the standard elements of the genre while simultaneously giving you a crash course in world history, classical and occult literature, crosscultural studies, and heaven knows what else besides. It’s by no means an easy book to read — I freely admit that there were entire chapters where names and literary references were completely lost on me and I had to piece together the characters’ train of thought as best I could — but Eco does a fine job explaining the crucial plot points and information in a way that doesn’t make it sound as if he’s talking down to the readers. And while I didn’t find the characters as engaging as those in The Name of the Rose, they’re still carefully drawn and interesting to follow. The story takes time to unfold and set up, and the Plan isn’t introduced until almost two-thirds of the way through the book, but the build-up is absolutely necessary to give the reader a sense of place in the story and a slightly more distanced perspective on the madness that brings the plot to its conclusion.

Perhaps the most important point that Eco makes in this book about conspiracy theories is that conspiracy theories (no matter how small at the outset) are by their very nature insidious, all too adept at getting under your skin and completely skewing your view of reality. Even the three editors are not immune to the power of conspiracy theories, even though they are fully aware that they’ve made the whole thing up as part of a silly game. As Causabon notes bitterly, on reflection, ‘I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.’ There’s a very clear warning in that comment, one that I definitely had to keep in mind as I read this book — and one which I have a feeling I’ll keep in mind for some time to come when looking at historical and literary connections.