Review : The Slavic Myths

It's time to resume my extensive mythology review series with another outing from Thames & Hudson. This one, simply called The Slavic Myths (authors Noah Charney and Svetlana Slapšak), isn't part of their "Myths That Shape The Way We Think" series that first got me hooked on T&H, though it's pretty close. It doesn't quite examine how the myths have influenced our modern-day thinking, but it presents much the same sort of literary analysis : what the myths mean, how they originated, and a description of their variations. The format is to give chapters as pairs, with the first presenting a retelling of the myth using its major elements, and the accompanying second chapter giving the analysis.

As with the other T&H mythology books, this is excellent. The retellings are written in a modern, accessible way, with plenty of description of both the environment and the emotional states of the characters (a tad simplistic, but more than enough to get the job done). We also don't get laden with the endless hyperbolic "twee" that so often plagues so many early fairy tales : that is, we don't get a dozen castle fairer than man ever saw in the same story, nor dozens of chaste maidens* each more beautiful than the last.

* Often not-so-chaste by the end of the story, mind you.

The analyses are extremely clear, interesting, and without pushing any agenda except to convince the reader that Slavic myths are really cool. They also have the touches of humour that are quite frequent in T&H, e.g. "Koschei the Deathless was now Koschei the Dead". 

There are two things I especially like here. First, it points to a possible connection route between the Norse and Greek myths, which otherwise seem so similar yet so far separated from each other. Second, there's much more of a horror aspect than in other mythology books, which makes everything feel both familiar and novel. It's not that the other European folklore and mythology lacks its darker side, but here the intention is much more straightforwardly, and far more frequently, designed to scare the reader*. More on both of these below.

* Exceptions that prove the rule : The Dead of Winter (Europe) and Of Doves And Ravens (Wales) both have collections of horrifying legends, but both but both are deliberately curated as such. The point is that there's relatively little of the fear factor in other mythological collections more generally.

I'm giving this one a solid 8/10; I could easily be persuaded to bump this to 9 if it was just a bit longer.

Right then, here are my personal highlights. I'll try very, very hard to keep this concise.

Singing Slavs

The early Slavs were not your typical bunch of barbarians. They were described by some writers as monotheistic and democratic, preferring wailing to warfare... okay, maybe I'm pushing the alliteration too hard. But while large and muscular, they would rather sing and dance than fight anyone, which isn't your typical description of a heathen people from a late Roman source. Certainly this wasn't a universal, as Slavic kings were definitely a thing and they had a rich pantheon of gods, but maybe some local tribes were exceptional. It's otherwise a very strange thing to just make up.

The Slavs were also never a politically unified people. Being prolific, they spread out over a huge geographical area, merging with the locals as they went.  They were, in fact, sophisticated singing Slavs, highly cosmopolitan and multicultural. So much for some ghastly vision of early European racial purity a la Elon Musk's fascist idiocy.

They also persisted with paganism (aargh ! I can't stop it !) until at least the 9th century, in some cases into at least the 1400s or even very much longer. Not all of this meant harmony with nature and singing nice songs about flowers... some of the descriptions of temples adorned with animal horns and carved gods make them sometimes sound somewhat sinister.

Scary Slavs

The Slavs didn't have a monopoly on frightening folklore, but it does seem to have been more predominant than in other cultures. By far the best known examples are, of course, vampires and werewolves.

Vampires

While belief in both creatures go back to truly ancient times, like the Welsh beliefs in the gwrach ar rhibyn, such ideas persisted into the much more recent past. The craze that would eventually become the fully-formed modern idea of the vampire seems to have begun in 18th century Serbia. The earliest versions concern commoners, not nobles, who would rise from their graves to kill the living, but it took longer for them to develop blood-drinking attributes and the host of other supernatural powers that are the mainstay of modern vampire lore.

What they did already have was a vulnerability to crosses (in the retelling here, the cross even bursts into flame when they confront the vampire), holy water, and of course a stake through the heart. But not because it would make them explode Buffy-style, because they couldn't be truly killed at all. Drowning the corpse in holy water, staking it, and burying it under heavy rocks couldn't kill it... because it was truly already dead : all these measures could do was stop it escaping. And it must be pretty scary if you really believe that the corpse you just faced is still writhing underground at night, hoping for a release to resume its hunt for the living.

Other dramatic elements include a report where the stake couldn't penetrate the corpse, or, conversely, where impaling caused the whole grave to fill with blood. One other key aspect of the early legends was the idea of vampires as contagion : if the first rumours didn't include vampire propagation by bite, they they were certainly associated with plague and illness. It's easy to see how the association could itself become personified, with a supernatural explanation for viruses filling in the gap of germ theory.

Werewolves

These seem to have been much closer to their modern incarnations from the word go. Originally, vampires and werewolves may even have been two words for the same monster, and hence the attributes of one eventually merged with that of the other. Werewolves were from the outset creatures that had to feed on blood to survive, couldn't enter a home unless invited, could control the weather, and were also vulnerable to stakes. They differed from vampires in their shapeshifting abilities, their familiar aversion to silver (less widely-known is that other metals could kill them, but only if left in the body), and that they were very much still alive : they were notionally immortal and extremely hard to kill, but not because they were already dead.

Some werewolves seem to have been the familiar near-demonic monsters, but others were suicidal over what they'd become; the very earliest were just shape-changers with no other connotations. They had associations with the Moon, but also the Sun, with the whole "must transform under the full Moon" business being a much later invention, and most early werewolves were dangerous the whole time. Some particularly grisly tales include cannibalism, incest, infanticide, and mutilation. It's hard to escape the feeling that the Slavic myths could indeed be a lot nastier than some of the other European stories... which makes them all the more fascinating.

Whereas vampires (in this relatively modern era) started in Serbia and spread outwards, werewolves were much more widespread. One of the stranger things, to me, is that while investigators of the same time had no issue with the reality of vampires, witches, ghosts and other supernatural creatures, they usually took great exception to the idea that a man could physically transform into a wolf. The same people that believed in blood-sucking undead demons would suddenly turn positively woke, deeming supposed "werewolves" to be the product of deranged minds in need of mental health assistance. Quite why this should be the point where people finally decide that this is all getting a bit silly is not at all clear.

Sexist Slavs

Well... partially. I don't think you can really spin one single coherent narrative on gender issues here. There are mermaid-like creatures living in freshwater who lure men to their deaths with the promise of sex, but there are also male versions who seduce women; more rarely, the lucky "victim" gets to rule the underwater realm. Perun, the supreme god, is largely associated with thunder and lightning but also fertility – but more in the harvest sense rather than sexual. And female goddesses seem to be just as complex as their male counterparts.

The retelling of the story of Libuše, the fairytale founder of Prague, encapsulates this complexity. In the story she's a wise and revered ruler, but because she makes one mistake that a single man can't tolerate, she's forced out in favour of an "iron king". One the one hand, female rule seems genuinely admired here, but on the other, she's still usurped for no good reason :

"You want a man to rule you. You want someone to drag your children away from you to serve him, to kill and die for him. You want a man who will tax you the way you deserve to be taxed, taking your best cattle and horses. You want to serve a harsh master and to pay for it. None of this I have asked of you, and yet... you want to be dominated rather than shamed by having a woman ruler."

And yet even here, the "iron king" they get is strictly a metaphorical one who uses his iron ploughshare as a table, not because they actually do want a man's man to tell them all what to do. He turns out to be quite a nice chap, in fact.

Then of course there are female monsters, which are far from gender-focused. There are witches that are yet another variant of the undead, rising from their graves to eat children (in Slavic belief they are distinctly creatures, being always old – you can't learn to be a Slavic witch). There are Baba Yagas, sometimes hideous and hostile cannibals – in the story here she lives in her hut on hen's legs inside a fence of human bones – but sometimes helpful. Baba Yaga is not a straightforward monster like an ogre : even when aggressive*, she must obey certain rules rather than skipping straight to dinner time. As with the Norse, then, there are definitely sexist tendencies present, but it's nothing whatever like the modern notion of a simpler past when men were men and women were ornaments.

* And she can be as terrifying figure as any vampire. Huge and horrible, she flies through the forest in a mortar and pestle, the trees opening up to let her pass. 

Supernatural Shamanic Slavs

The pantheon of Slavic gods is easily as complex as those of the Norse or the Greeks. Like them, these were not personified forces like the early Roman gods, but distinctly human, and could have multiple, unrelated associations. Veles, a devil-like figure, was associated with swamps, caves, and dark places, but also the god of music (well, the devil has all the best tunes), wealth, and poetry. A strict good and evil dichotomy appears to be absent. Perun's status as supreme god, and his associations with thunder, give him similarities to both Thor and Zeus, but his lack of sexuality also makes him very much his own entity. 

There's also a character to Slavic beliefs which is distinctly primitive and primal. Like the Norse, they believed in a world tree, though of oak* rather than ash and a simpler structure of three worlds (the underworld, the middle earth, and the heavens) rather than the much more complex version of Yggdrasil. This also seems to have been mirrored through a three-headed god; like the Celtic mythologies, the connection to nature feels more prominent than in Graeco-Roman myths.

* Or sometimes hawthorn, more on which below. It was also gnawed on by a great dog, much as Yggdrasil was attacked from below by dragons, causing it to shake.

Similarly, the shamanic nature of Slavic belief is seen in the idea of a human-animal continuity. Much more on this when I (eventually) cover Neil Price's PhD thesis, but the basic idea was that humans and animals were fundamentally similar, each being thinking entities with non-corporeal souls. But there's also an aspect of something even more mystical, a sort of life-force of the world that could be drawn on for power that's nothing like praying to a god for assistance. This is the old magic.

Shamans could tap into the elemental forces in a variety of ways, some positive, some negative. They could defend their own tribes against other supernatural foes, but they could also amass in groups and war with each other. One of the more bizarre aspects consisted of them using cadaverous crampons : using human veins and arteries and tendons to give them sinewy snowshoes for climbing. Other shamans were believed to have dragon-like wings and superhuman strength, while others could do battle by sending out their souls (in one case even from a barber's shop). Even Saint Nicholas – yes, that one, Santa – may have shamanic tendencies in his battles with wind and thunder.

The landscape itself also formed a key part of belief. While water presents entrances to another realm as it sometimes does in Greek myth, this is considerably more frequent in Slavic and Celtic stories : here the protagonists can, and frequently do, wander into other worlds accidentally, whereas for the Greeks and Romans this required extreme effort. In Slavic tales specifically, water could hold the souls of the dead, with offerings made to appease the souls and mirrors covered after a death to prevent the deceased from watching the living.

Finally, plants also play a major role in Slavic sorcery. Stakes to incapacitate vampires and kill werewolves need to be of hawthorn, not just any old pointy stick. Hawthorn trees would be planted on the graves of such creatures to help hold them down. The hawthorn tree itself, say the authors, was seen as a liminal space, a boundary between the living and the dead (possibly in part due to its blood-red berries). It could be inhabited by demons who needed to be propriated with small offerings, or bound in the tree with metal horseshoes. Walnut and pear trees, on the other hand, were the abode of witches, while linden trees could travel by magic, and others conveyed the wisdom of medical knowledge. Cabbage, oddly, was seen as a phallic symbol. 

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So that's my first brief foray into Slavic lore. Like the mythologies of other cultures I've been reading, it has elements of the bizarre and the fantastical, some striking similarities to other traditions and some aspects which are all its own. It feels like this is a whole European subculture which is far too often overlooked; even Neil Price, who goes to considerable lengths to draw associations between Viking beliefs and shamanic practises, barely even mentions Slavic culture beyond that of northernmost Europe. And this is unfair, because the stories here are easily as sophisticated as anything else in Europe. 

When I describe them as primitive, I mean not that they're stupid, but their base appeal to the blood : the imagery of the dead rising, or of ripping out arteries for climbing gear, is one that resonates viscerally. You can't contemplate a man becoming wolf without a physical sense of fear of the animal within, just as a cannibal witch with a garden of bones is a symbol too potent to be easily dismissed. This does not mean the stories were simple. True, they did not have the vast, pseudo-history like structure of Greek myth, but only because the Slavs were so much more spread out; individual stories, were easily as complex as anything in any other mythology.

Charney and Slapšak's stated goal is to introduce readers to Slavic folklore and encourage further reading. For me they've succeeded : I'm already reading Flame Tree's much longer Slavic Myths & Tales. I just hope that darker edge isn't just the result of this particularly careful curation... give me a single bloodsucking vampire over any number of ornamental princesses any day of the week. Sod the nondescript castles and wish-fulfilment and give me something scary.

The Better Angels Of Our Scientific Nature

I've pointed out many times that what seems rational is constantly evolving as evidence changes. If you don't notice things disappearing over the horizon gradually, or the shadow of the Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse, then a flat Earth is an entirely sensible thing to believe in.

A contrary view from comes from the New Atheist crowd, who are apt to insist that all of humanity's history would have been better if people had just never believed in anything religious. This is a garbage and meritless claim, for many reasons/ For one thing, as Pratchett pointed out :

“The amount of belief in the world must be subject to an upper limit... It follows that if a major focus of belief is removed, there will be spare belief.”

You can't just stop believing in things by choice. Can't be done. And this follows in part from the above, that at one point, the evidence for the now-discarded ideas seemed very good indeed. Supernatural explanations made a lot of sense, because we understand minds and agency at a much more instinctual level than we do the conservation of momentum or the hysteresis curve. 

It follows, then, that at one point we really had very little option but to believe in supernatural agency for a good many things : we literally have to believe in something, and without a rational explanation available, the gap is filled with angels and demons.

Which leads me in to this thoroughly interesting Aeon essay which examines this in a lot more detail. More than that, it shows how philosophical musings on the nature of angels was anything but the proverbially-empty question : how many angels can dance on the head of the pin, it turns out, is a tremendously useful vehicle for exploring the nature of space and matter. Inquiries may have begun from a world view that now seems preposterous, but the full examination of these early ideas, when done with careful rigour and logic, led directly to some of the scientific notions we now find most fundamental of all.

This view of angels as immaterial ‘intelligences’ became pretty standard in medieval philosophy and theology. But the scholastic period saw an increasing desire to systematise, systematise, systematise. The precise nature or essence of angels became a serious cause for debate, and these debates were not mere thought experiments. Rather, because of the real belief in the existence of angels, theologians and philosophers could think through angels as a way of understanding the nature of the physical world and things like place, bodies and motion. 

This was motivated by significant theological concerns. One concern was that, if angels are immaterial intelligences, then what makes them different to God? For us, our bodies are what make us limited, able to exercise force only directly, such as when I throw a ball. Does this mean angels, having no body, could exist everywhere or act at a distance? This was dangerous territory for theologians, potentially challenging God’s omnipresence and omnipotence.

And again, I've gone on enough times about how Christianity isn't really monotheistic, because if you allow other supernatural powers which aren't under god's direct agency, then you've all but conceded paganism. However, the author here has a much more interesting point : that to make sense of angels conceptually, you have to grapple with basic physics. And no, the "it's just magic" explanation was not enough for medieval theologians.

The view was that angels had to be located (i.e., limited) but without a body. The key to understanding the angelic debates of the scholastic period is to understand what conceptual tools the physics of the day provided. For all intents and purposes, this physics was Aristotle. For Aristotle, physics was simply about things that move and, on his account, bodies don’t move because of gravity or kinetic energy or the warping of spacetime but because of their natures. 

Similarly, there was no concept of absolute space, but rather a concept of ‘place’, which, unlike Newtonian absolute space or Albert Einstein’s spacetime, does not exist entirely independent of the bodies that inhabit it. As the philosopher Tiziana Suárez-Nani points out in Angels, Space and Place (2008), ‘space … as an undifferentiated and homogenous receptacle, was alien to the medieval mind.’ For Aristotle, bodies could not exist without place, which served as a kind of container. Likewise, there had to be bodies for there to be place. In other words, a vacuum is not possible in Aristotle’s view.

I think it's worth pausing for a moment to consider just how profoundly different this is from the modern concept of space. For us, space is a container : it consists of nothing in itself, but it's where everything goes. It's the "fabric" of the Universe which can itself expand, warp, contract etc., but it's not really a physical thing. It's more the reference system we have for other objects. It isn't defined by them, though it is intimately connected*. It can, in principle, be absolutely empty (vacuum energy notwithstanding), and indeed that's exactly what we mean by space itself. The kind of vacuum-abhorring "place" that Aristotle espoused was something altogether different from our modern notion.

* And people say dualism is some sort of mysticism ! Don't worry, I'm not going there today.

So, what has that got to do with angels? If you recall, theological concerns at the time required angels to have a specific location – to be limited and bodiless – in order to avoid angels with limitless power, rendering them omnipotent as well as omnipresent. Normally, the material body of something locates it, so how can immaterial angels be located? Aquinas and others solved this problem creatively, locating angels not by their physical dimensionality but by their operations. Aquinas proposed that an angel has a different type of location than a bodily being. An angel is in a place by virtue of applying its power to the physical objects in a given place. This limited both an angel’s operations and their location, locating them by their operations, rather than by a body.

Right, so you can have angels which aren't omnipotent or omnipresent and are still immaterial and supernatural. Hooray ! But :

Importantly, the Condemnations of 1277 forbade believing that angels are located by their operations rather than by their substance, so Aquinas’ solution for angelic location was now off the table. If an angel exists in a place solely by its operations, as Aquinas claimed, then what happens when it’s not operating? Angels had to be rethought.

Here’s what Scotus did: he made ‘place’ more mathematical, less tied to location and more similar to our notion of dimension. When thought about in terms of dimension, the ‘place’ occupied by an object stays the same as the object moves through locations. In this sense, its ‘place’, redefined as dimension, is the same, even though it changes location. In other words, Scotus, as aptly stated by Lang, ‘neutralises’ place radically. On the Aristotelian account, direction or location were part of the definition of ‘place’. When redefined more mathematically as a kind of dimension, direction is no longer a necessary feature of this new kind of ‘place’. You can have an idea much more like that of ‘space’, something that doesn’t inherently contain ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘left’ or ‘right’ in its definition.

Technically, this meant that God could create a rock in no ‘place’, if place referred to Aristotle’s definition of place, which was a location within the outermost rim of the heavenly spheres. Whereas Aristotle had defined place as a necessary defining feature of physical bodies, Scotus did not. Instead, he created a hybrid account in which something can exist inside the outermost rim of the celestial sphere (occupying place in the Aristotelian sense), but it doesn’t have to; it could equally just occupy space by having dimension outside of that sphere.

And to use another Pratchett quote : all places are indeed one place, but that place is very large. 

Ahem. We even get something akin to the Uncertainty Principle cropping up :

The image Lang uses, citing Scotus, is of a surface that must have colour, but whose colour can be anything. Angels can occupy a place however small or large, just not infinitely so, and they must operate in a place, though they themselves exist in the place indeterminately... To posit angels as immaterial external forces was indeed oddly closer to a classical physics that sees an invisible force like gravity working on bodies externally. In fact, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz accused Newton of having introduced occult forces with his theory of gravity, because gravity seemed to be a supernatural force acting on bodies at a distance.

I mean, it just tells you a lot about human psychology when you find scientists accusing each other of being occult because their rigorous, predictable, mathematical theorems are somehow similar to angels... I'm not sure what exactly it's telling us, but it's certainly a lot, whatever it is. It's interesting to consider "angels" as a proxy for "force", though it would seem very strange to suggest that God ordered the world using ultra-obedient angels rather than just making things go round and round. Why didn't planets move directly according to his will ? Perhaps this again points to a seriously profound mismatch between our modern concepts and the medieval mindset. 

The role angels played in such thought experiments was unique: angels transcended the purely physical world but were still ‘creatures’ that abided by the rules and the logic governing the Universe.. .angels, precisely because of their intermediary status, allowed human beings to think about dimensions of created reality that yet transcended our direct human perceptions.

While it is easy enough to ridicule the suggestion that movement is the result of occult forces such as angels, we cannot, having ascended the ladder of knowledge, so easily kick that ladder out from under ourselves... We equate ‘up’ with ‘more’ when we say ‘the stock market rises’ because when we see, for example, rocks piled up, we learn to equate higher with more. We say we ‘grasp’ an idea because we have experienced reaching for a piece of fruit on a tree. In addition, we have a very hard time imagining a nonphysical thing. What we imagine, when we imagine a soul or an angel or a demon, is some kind of insubstantial, but still ghostly, object.

I would say slightly the opposite on this last point. We have no problems at all imagining ghosts in an abstract sense. Ghost ? Sure, it's a person who can walk through walls, wails around a lot waving chains and making woo-woo noises. Easy peasy. But try and explain how this works on the physical level and we come quickly unstuck. How can it be perceived if it doesn't interact with light ? How can we hear its woo-woo noises if it can walk through solid walls : why would its lungs interact with the molecules of the air, and why doesn't it fall through the floor ? Nevertheless, the imaginary concept of a ghost is simplicity itself.

Although occult forces such as angels and demons may be ridiculed in modern culture as ‘hand-wavey’ explanations of quite logical, down-to-earth scientific phenomena, I would suggest the inverse. That what is most down-to-earth might in fact be to think about the invisible forces of nature as angels, agents, immaterial intelligences with certain properties familiar to us, but amplified. Properties like agency and intention. It is only in thinking through, and with, these more familiar concepts that we can then discover a less intuitive set of concepts, like spacetime, which require grounding in concepts like dimension, body, place and movement. These necessary grounding concepts were sharpened, historically, by thinking through the relationship between the material and immaterial world, and angelology played a significant role in their honing.

And I find myself in strong agreement. I presume that the author doesn't mean that we really should think about things as all being imbued with intentionality or anything like that, only that we naturally do. Such a beginning is our jumping-off point, something we can easily understand in order to progress to the next level. Saying that electrons, in suspiciously Aristotleian-fashion, want to reach the lowest energy state, is a very handy lie-to-children. Pretty soon (sometimes immediately) we realise that the electron doesn't necessarily want anything at all, in the literal sense, but the metaphor helps us understand. Only with that basic concept in hand can we get to the hard mathematics, to try and consider – insofar as our observational data permits us – what's really going on.

Right then, time to write to Dan Brown and tell him to write a blockbuster sequel. I'm sure philosophical musings on the nature of immaterial angels and their implications for cosmology is a guaranteed cinema hit.

Review : Galileo's Daughter (II)

Welcome back to the concluding part of my review-summary of Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter. In part one I covered how Galileo was a prodigious polymath, something which often gets lost in the simplified "he was imprisoned for teaching that the Sun goes around the Earth" version of events. I also looked briefly at Galileo as a man, ending with how for him, the idea of a conflict between natural inquiry and holy doctrine barely made sense. 

In this second part, I'll begin with these now largely estranged viewpoints didn't pose a problem for Galileo's own philosophy, but then how this came into such prominent conflict with the Church. I'll end with a look at whether Sobel's own interpretation – that the problem was not one of a clash of world views – is really correct.

3) Galileo the Philosopher

Galileo, says Sobel, believed that God revealed truths through two books. One of these was Holy Scripture, which could never be wrong, but could be misinterpreted and wasn't intended to be taken literally. The second was nature itself, "this grand book the Universe". Observation was truth and could never be wrong. Where the two appeared in conflict, ultimately nature must prevail, and scripture recognised to be symbolic :

"Holy Scripture and Nature are both emanations from the divine word : the former dictated by the Holy Spirit, the latter the observant executrix of God's commands."

Key here is that while Galileo might be somewhat morally flexible, he really seems to have believed this. Nor was this an unusual or even unorthodox view. While Galileo himself popularised the famous quote that the Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go... the original source was no less than a Cardinal ! Indeed, the book is replete with high-ranking Church officials endorsing Galileo's work with some enthusiasm, and until the moment of the publication of the famous Dialogue, it would be hard to see him as being anything other than on the best of terms with the Church fathers. 

Not everyone, it's true, was a fan, but the overwhelming nature of his detractors appears to have been one of envy. There might be a smattering of religious fanaticism here and there, but Galileo himself dismissed this as mere "pretended religion", a means to an end, not a sincere belief at all.

This view of nature as the work of God led to a total rejection of the idea of intelligent design. He offers an argument for accepting uncertainty and rejecting the exalted status of mankind which is at once both theological and scientific :

"When I am told that an immense space interposed between the planetary orbits and the starry sphere would be useless and vain, being idle and devoid of stars, and that any immensity going beyond our comprehension would be superfluous for holding the fixed stars, I say that it is brash for our feebleness to attempt to judge the reason for God's actions, and to call everything in the universe vain and superfluous which does not serve us."

In other words, we might not understand why or how God operates, but that damn well doesn't mean we can't observe the world he's made, or reject it because it disagrees with our ideas about how it should be. He continues :

"I believe that one of the greatest pieces of arrogance, or rather madness, that can be thought of is to say, 'Since I do not know how Jupiter or Saturn is of service to me, they are superfluous, and even do not exist*'. Because, o deluded man, neither do I know how my arteries are of service to me, nor my cartilages, spleen or gall; I should not even know that I had a gall, or a spleen, or kidneys, if they had not been shown to me in many dissected corpses."

* While the majority response seems to have been one of awe, a few people had indeed refused to even look through Galileo's telescope. 

Practically minded as he was, he was also thinking of the philosophical implications of what he was doing and his methodology. While he was clear that experiment and observation had the last word, he used thought experiments as guides. For example, when considering whether heavier objects fall faster, he imagined two objects merging in mid-fall to ask whether their speed would then spontaneously increase. Although the notion of gravity evaded him, he at least considered the basis of relative motion, imagining that if you dropped a ball when pulled along on a moving platform, the ball would still keep moving forwards as it fell. In understanding why 45 degrees was the optimum angle to maximise the range of a projectile, he wrote :

"To understand why this happens far outweighs the mere information obtained by the testimony of others or even by repeated experiment."

I like this argument very much. When you understand the reason for something, you can predict what will happen in new situations. You've gained a fundamental insight into how the world works, even, in sense, a measure of control over it. Pure data collection and observation are sometimes an underrated part of the scientific process (likened unflatteringly to stamp collecting), but ultimately this kind of understanding is the nugget of shining gold we're all searching for. This is the epitomy of the scientific endeavour, not to merely quantify the world, but to understand it at the deepest level the human mind allows.

Galileo even came up with an argument that would presage Wigner by several centuries, recognising that the Universe did indeed follow mathematical laws – in sharp contradiction to Aristotle's silly view that the world was just more complicated than that :

"Just as the accountant who wants his calculations to deal with sugar, silk and wool must discount the boxes, bales, and other packings, so the mathematical scientist, when he wants to recognise in the concrete the effects he has proved in the abstract, must deduct any material hinderances; and if he is able to do that, I assure you that things are in no less agreement than are arithmetical computations. The trouble lies, then, not in abstractness or concreteness, but with the accountant who does not know how to balance his books."

Here was a true, practical philosopher*. He saw no contradiction between science and religion and indeed saw his work as revealing the glory of god : "To imagine an infinite universe was merely to grant almighty God his proper due". There were, of course, those who disagreed. Some did so out of envy and jealously, some out of sheer stupidity. And one, in particular, seems to have done so, if we have to reduce it to a single cause, out of an insistence on authoritarian control. Belief in a deity itself was never the cause of the strife, but the need to assert power over others has an awful lot to answer for.

* What's especially fascinating to me is how some other philosophical arguments of this and earlier eras are incredibly sophisticated, yet the practical, natural philosophy remained stuck in an age of astonishing stupidity. This is quite the reverse of the common tendency to proclaim that our intellect gets ahead of our morality. Maybe this is true today, but for the longest time, our practical understanding was incredibly slight and completely outpaced by moral philosophy – if not by how we actually treated each other in reality.

4) Galileo the Criminal

Pope Urban VIII was a cunt. He wasn't the only cunt, and he didn't start out being such a cunt, and he certainly wasn't one of the stupid cunts like what we have nowadays, but nevertheless, he had a nasty, vindictive streak, was thin-skinned, and didn't like to back down in the face of a challenge. He was, I say again, a cunt.

Galileo had a tendency to sail close to the wind, to push the boundaries of what the Church would allow. He also had a healthy fear of being ostracised, and in the face of censure and censorship, he usually backed down. He consistently tried very hard, however, to pre-empt this, discussing his ideas with high-ranking members of the clergy before publishing them and always (until the very end) doing everything through the proper channels. He was personally friends with many high-ranking members of the Church, most of whom praised him for his wonderful discoveries of all kinds, and on good terms with the Pope himself. So how did it all go so suddenly and catastrophically wrong ?

The initial dispute in 1616 was relatively mild. Heliocentrism wasn't deemed heretical, but the Church required it to be discussed as a hypothesis, not fact. The Church, in the wake of the Reformation, was not feeling terribly secure, but Galileo was given personal assurances that his minor infraction hadn't damaged his high standing : he just had to be a bit more careful in the future, but everyone still thought he was the bee's knees.

More problematic was the business of interpreting the Bible. The problem with not taking Scripture as literal truth meant that both sides argued with each other as to whose interpretation was correct, and worse, who got to interpret the interpretations. The Church was moving in a direction of declaring itself the sole authority as to who was allowed to do this, which made Galileo's personal attempts at theology dangerous. Galileo, in contrast, was seeking to save the Church from itself, knowing that while the evidence for heliocentrism was not yet irrefutable – arguments were genuinely lacking, especially a theory of gravity for how it would all work – the time was coming when it would be proved with certainty, and to maintain denial would cause the Church to be ridiculed. People would, quite literally, lose faith.

But for the next 16 years or so, Galileo kept his work to himself and close colleagues. Only after much effort, seeking assurances from multiple clergy, and sending it through the Papal-approved publication censors and channels, did he submit a much more elaborate discussion. Initially, it was received with all the applause Galileo was accustomed to. Only when Pope Urban got wind of it did things go very quickly south.

What seems to have happened was a confluence of factors all making the Pope more of a cunt than usual. As well as the Reformation, he was feeling personally insecure due to accusations of not defending the faith with sufficient vigour. Galileo's detractors, recognising the early censure* of heliocentrism, sensed a chance to bring him low, and they seized upon it in full force. The Pope never read the 500 pages himself – all he heard was the filtered version from Galileo's enemies.

* With just two very small amendments and insertions required by the Church, the stronger term of "censorship" hardly seems appropriate. This was scarcely more than the actions of modern-day broadcast regulators, albeit applied to an arena which is out of bounds to the Inquisition's modern-day counterparts.

What the Pope heard was partly correct and partly an egregious distortion. It was true that Galileo was openly supporting heliocentrism as fact, not hypothesis. Technically he had fully complied with all the directives, but in practise, nobody reading it would ever come away with the impression the geocentrism remained a valid theory. At his trial, he bowed completely to the pressure – there was never any famous "and yet it moves !" defiance from a by now frail old man – and pretended that he actually fully believed in the Ptolemaic model, saying that maybe he'd once considered heliocentrism an interesting alternative but no more than that. He maintained that his work was not intended to promote the heliocentric model in any way. He presented a document that he believed gave him full license to consider it hypothetically, but none of this was enough to satisfy the more belligerent Inquisitors (although only 7/10 signed the final verdict) or the Pope himself... who was, of course, a cunt.

Why do I labour this point ? Because Urban never even read the document, yet doubled down on his wrath. He eventually had Galileo moved, not out of kindness so he could be closer to his daughter, but because his ostensible gaolkeeper was actually treating him as more of an honoured guest, receiving many visitors for scientific discussions. Far worse, Urban had all of his existing (and future) works banned from further printing : a wholly mean-spirited and petty thing to do, an action of pure spite given that half of Europe had already read them. 

The part that seemed to personally wind him up was that Galileo had used some of his favourite arguments to favour heliocentrism... or at least, this is how things are usually described, but really this is a bit too simple. The fuller version is more subtle.

In an earlier essay, Galileo had written an analogy that was pleasing to both scientist and theologian alike, a story of a man who goes around looking to understand the various ways in which animals produce sounds. He learns a great deal, but eventually finds one which doesn't fit any of theories, so realising that the omnipotence of God is greater than he can imagine. Man can learn much, the fictional investigator realises, but the full wonders of the Universe are beyond human comprehension. 

This argument "delighted Urban", and so Galileo used it in the dialogue (as he was instructed to do) for the debater who prefers geocentrism. At the end, he concedes that the magnificence of God is such that he might be wrong, and that God might indeed allow a heliocentric universe. Together with the others conceding that they cannot offer certain proof of heliocentrism, this was enough for the document to pass muster for publication. It all feels very delicate and respectable, and not at all the case of "Galileo made fun of the Pope" which even today is how it's written in some popular descriptions. Rather it seems thoroughly intellectual and nuanced.

What marks Urban as a complete cunt is that he swallowed the argument that Galileo was mocking him without ever bothering to check. He was willing to fine him and sentence him to life imprisonment – Galileo was even threatened with torture – all on the basis of what other people said, despite having been on such personally good terms with the man until almost that very moment. He would have undone all his life's works without ever even trying to check if he was being fed the correct interpretation of what Galileo had actually written. Why he did this is, sadly, the missing piece of the argument, but the result, of course is history.

Conclusions

The censorship of the Catholic Church was indefensible by modern standards, but its importance has been massively exaggerated by New Atheists. Neither Galileo nor Copernicus (who was never branded a heretic) were seeking any conflict with the Church or to undermine religion, but they did have a different approach to theological inquiry. For them, studying the natural world revealed the handiwork of God and was literally incapable of contradiction with holy writ, with the Scriptures subject to human error and therefore subservient to observation. 

For those like Pope Urban, it was not quite that the situation was reversed. It was more that he believed that God was not bound even by human imagination, that God could, if he wanted, commit something logically inconsistent like creating a rock so heavy he couldn't lift it. Whereas Galileo might see God as bound to create things which were ordered and harmonious, Urban imposed no such restrictions.

Galileo also offered an argument of cosmic economics. Whereas the Ptolemaic system offered Earth an exalted central status, but at the same time made it degenerate and changeable, Galileo said that its rarity in the heavens – not its immutability or position – made it valuable. Morality and cosmology were linked, and so Galileo made clever arguments to overturn the Ptolemaic framework on this front too. But the weight of history was perhaps here against him, and worse was the Church's increasing zeal to control information.

And this, I think, is the really interesting discrepancy between Galileo and his detractors. It's not at all about science versus religion in the highest, abstract sense : belief in deities is orthogonal to belief in what those deities happen to do or what they require of humans, and says nothing in itself about how they chose to order the world. It might be fairer to compare science to academia and religions to the Church, human institutions pitted against one another rather than their ideals. And at the heart of it seems a strongly illiberal desire amongst the Church – not the religion – to dictate what is true. 

I always remember hearing a well-known scientific contrarian declare, for no real reason at all, that "at some point you've got to make a decision", that is, to declare what the answer is so that everyone else can move forward. For the scientific consensus this is exactly what you mustn't ever do. Consensus is only successfully forged from independent findings, and only achieves its strength precisely because everyone has worked so hard to pull it down and failed. The idea that anyone gets to decide what's True, to tell everyone else what they have to believe, is anathema to the whole project. 

As scientists, we can only offer evidence and arguments; as humans, we can certainly try and persuade because we think that believing the truth as we see it will be of benefit to others. What we cannot ever do is to Declare Truth. Once we decide on truth by authority, we have lost the path of righteous truth-seeking and fallen into a need for power. The need to control others, for them to believe specific things even when the alternatives are completely harmless... that's what was at work with Urban. That's, I think, the "one trial of Galileo" that was really going on beneath the surface accusations.

It's what we see today among many fanatics, both of religious ilk but also the weirder segments of the political ideologues. To brand all the religious as being unthinking dolts as the New Atheists would have it is to catastrophically miss the point : what we should be fighting against is not spiritual beliefs, but the the illiberal ideas that we must impose our ideas on everyone else, to control rather than convince, to declare rather than discuss. In this age where one political side appears to be degenerating into ever more incoherent fascist farce, maintaining this liberal view is increasingly difficult. But if we can't accept that other people are perfectly entitled to hold stupid but harmless beliefs, then what are we even struggling for ? 

Review : Galileo's Daughter (I)

There was only one trial of Galileo, although legends often speak of two... There was only one trial of Galileo, and yet it seems there were a thousand – the suppression of science by religion, the defence of individualism against authority, the clash between revolutionary and establishment, the challenge of radical new discoveries to ancient beliefs, the struggle against intolerance for freedom of thought and freedom of speech. No other process in the annals of canon or common law had ricocheted through history with more meanings, more consequences, more conjectures, more regrets.

Today, a look at Dava Sobel's magisterial Galileo's Daughter. First published in 1999, this was one of the books from an unread stockpile I bought back with me from my last trip home.

I can only find two real weaknesses with this book, both minor. It's a little weirdly undefined in its goals in the first couple of chapters or so, making the pace a feel just a little bit off. It would have helped a little to spell out what the book was going to be about, especially because of the title. We hear almost nothing of the eponymous daughter until a hundred pages in, and even thereafter, she's not really the focus at all.

Not that this matters. What the book actually is is a biography of Galileo, focusing heavily on his conflict with the Inquisition. The central thesis is that while this might have been a conflict between an academic and the Church, by no means was this a clash between science and religion. Along the way we get an in-depth look at Galileo the man, particularly drawing on letters from his daughter, but also plenty of theological and philosophical insights. 

If she fails to give a clear mission statement of what the book is supposed to be, Sobel nevertheless manages to balance things perfectly. The book is not one word too long or too short. We get enough background to Galileo's life to understand the trial in its full context without losing focus; enough detail on the trial itself to understand how things proceeded without getting into unnecessary minutiae; enough of the aftermath to follow the consequences without losing sight of Galileo the man. We get all the core philosophical arguments, all the essential subtle differences between the views of Galileo and his detractors, presented in a clear and unbroken narrative flow. Overall, I think I have to give this one 9/10.

I cannot possibly give a summary that retains Sobel's narrative without still being many thousands of words long. So instead, let's try the usual thematic approach, gradually building up to the all-important trial which has become so (arguably) spuriously emblematic of the conflict between science and religion. In this first part, I'll look at Galileo's other achievements outside astronomy and his character as a person. In part two, I'll cover his philosophical approach to scientific inquiry and his conflict with the Church.

1) Galileo the Polymath

Perhaps the first thing that becomes apparent is that Galileo was no one-hit-wonder. To be honest this is something I should have been more aware of, but while I knew something of Galileo's astronomy, I had only vague impressions of his experiments on motion, and I knew nothing at all about his more practical skills.

Here Galileo is revealed to be a true renaissance man, a veritable polymath to rival Da Vinci except for his lack of artistic achievements. He possibly could have gone down this route – his father was a musician and his own drawings of the Moon are of extremely high quality – but he seems to have preferred to have concentrated firmly on science and engineering. His more creative tendencies were reserved for his public outreach activities and tending to his garden. And this is no bad thing, since, unlike Da Vinci, he left little unfinished. His interests were wide-ranging, and yet he seemed to have no issue with taking years to complete his projects : not to say that he wanted things to take this long, but he wouldn't get distracted along the way. If he was ever derailed, then it wasn't by choice, and he'd almost always eventually pick up where he left off.

Galileo's most famous non-astronomy work is surely dropping cannonballs off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Sobel is careful is her framing here of this "legendary" experiment, but in the text as written, it sounds very much as though he actually did do this, and much earlier in his career than in the more carefully-documented case of rolling balls down an inclined plane. Still, he wrote with some bitterness that while the larger ball did beat the smaller, the point was that they don't fall at anything like the same speed, as Aristotle had claimed : his detractors were completely missing the point. "Speaking of my tiny error", he wrote, they "remain silent about his enormous mistake".

He would tackle more minor but important problems throughout his life. In Venice he was granted a patent on an irrigation device, and while under house arrest much later in life, he prepared a practical demonstration to explain why a recent bell-casting had failed in spectacular fashion. For income, he was partly supported by the sale of his own geometric calculating compass : a sort of elaborate slide-rule for a wide variety of mathematical calculations. Whilst conducting his early observations of the heavens, he also showed, as a side project, that objects float because of their density and not their shape as the prevailing wisdom dictated*, thus overturning centuries of conventional wisdom by having some bloody common sense.

* There was an odd belief that ice was actually heavier than water, which is something so easy to test that it just seems bizarre that nobody ever checked it.

Perhaps the most impressive Galilean spin-off came later. During his experiments on acceleration with inclined planes, he developed standardised measurements to ensure he was making fair comparisons between data points. This was in itself a monumental breakthrough. First, that he came up with a practical method to reach the precision and accuracy needed, but secondly, that the concept of standardised measurements simply didn't exist. This was a profoundly non-mathematical world, and while the mentality of those in the distant past can be startlingly similar to our own, in other ways it can be shocking in its most fundamental differences. Galileo played no small role in changing that. And finally, he did this in his old age while in chronic ill health. So much for the idea that scientific revolutions are the province of the young... In his rigorously quantitative approach, Galileo would surely appreciate the cliché that age really is just a number.

Oh yes, and he also invented the microscope. Janus-like, he looked both to world above and below, and if he spent more time on the firmament than terra firma, this seems to have been merely a matter of happenstance. Galileo appears to have been very much the right man at the right time : he had the practical skills needed to develop the instruments and the mindset to appreciate just how radical his discoveries really were. As he himself wrote with no false modesty :

"I render infinite thanks to God for being so kind as to make me alone the first observer of marvels kept hidden in obscurity for all previous centuries... four planets never seen from the beginning of the world right up to our day."

Through some admittedly blurry images from crude glass, Galileo's discoveries would change the world. Small wonder that not everyone approved. With the simplest of devices and an image quality that still left much to be desired, he was proposing nothing less than a total restructuring of reality.

2) Galileo the man

But before we get carried away, it's worth a brief look at the character of Galileo. The figure that emerges from Sobel's telling is a genius and generally a good egg by the standards of his day. He seems to have been extremely generous to his family, sparing what little income he had (in his early days) to support them with enthusiasm rather than reluctance. 

But he was not much of a social radical. True, he wrote a rather bawdy poem bemoaning the fact that his scholarly toga wouldn't let him visit brothels (we've all had that problem), but he also put his daughters in convents and didn't marry his partner as this was just not the done thing for scholars at the time. Which also reveals that even this most Catholic of countries could, and did, easily find ways around the rules when it suited them. It was never a case of the Church having absolute control over people's lives, which is purely the stuff of myth.

The advantage of Sobel's biography is to set Galileo's work in the context of his personal life. In many scientific histories, it's easy to think of them as pathologically obsessed with research : this Galileo is, instead, a real person with real person things to do. We follow his surprisingly mobile career in institutes in towns across Italy, his chronic ill health (making it all the more impressive that he reached 77 years of age by the time of his death), his love for his family along with his (very) occasional chastisements. We see him being delighted to send them fruit and exasperated when they turn up en masse for a while in his rather modest accommodations; the embarrassment of his daughter on learning that "buffalo eggs" were actually a type of cheese is still palpable after more than three centuries.

What emerges is, as you might expect, a complex character. He was famously entertaining and flamboyant, and could use this in the most obsequious terms of flattery when seeking a patron. He seems to have a real need to be liked by people as well as persuade them of his ideas, but also (like many exuberant promoters) was quite willing to offend. Although generally quite careful in what he wrote, he would sometimes deliberately tread on people's toes if they disagreed with him. He definitely seems to have had an arrogant streak that was perhaps the source of his rhetorical flair, but it was hardly unjustified : he really had seen things that nobody had seen before and contemplated them in ways undreamt of.

But he also seems to have been something of an egalitarian and favoured a meritocratic approach to education. He worked under the patronage system and adopted university dress codes only insofar as he could not avoid them, preferring more casual attire whenever possible. He wrote his outreach dialogues in Italian, not Latin, having a genuine belief that this would be of benefit to the common man and not just to the scholarly elite. If he does seem to nonetheless have enjoyed being one of the elite, he definitely valued learning wherever he found it. He does not appear to have been especially concerned with fighting culture wars or calling for any sort of social reform. He would help people when he could, but doesn't seem to have contemplated any structural changes to society – though he did have some very definite ideas about where the Church was going wrong theologically.

Perhaps his biggest contradiction was that he was willing the bend the rules and outright lie in the interests of the greater truth. In this we must allow two things : first, that most of us will probably try to save our own skins ahead of sticking to our principles, and that parts of the Church were most certainly corrupt. "No-one has spoken with more piety or with greater zeal for the Church than I", he wrote. Yet when necessary, he also called his own work, "merely a poetical conceit, or a dream... this fancy of mine... this chimera." His beliefs were sincere, but his approach was flexible.

Galileo knew he was right and the Church was wrong, and that in his mind, suppression of his ideas was harmful to everyone – including the Church. If he had to lie about what he really believed in order to publish it, then so be it. If he had to take desperate measures in publishing them in the protestant Netherlands, and then proclaiming in transparently ridiculous terms that he had no idea how that happened, then he was surely justified in doing so. Sticking rigidly to his principles and telling the Church where to shove it might have been a heroic stance to take, but Galileo was no hero... and it would have been profoundly unwise. Galileo was right and the Church was wrong, but as we shall see, this is not at all the same as the claim that science and religion were at odds. In Galileo's own mind, such a thing was not even possible. 

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In part two, we'll move on to see how Galileo had no issues in reconciling science and religion, and indeed the very idea of a conflict was barely imagined. Nor was he alone in his theological happiness, with his views being widely shared amongst the upper echelons of the Church. Naturally, then, we'll conclude with a look at how, despite everyone being one big happy god-fearing family, everything went so catastrophically wrong for a man so used to widespread acclaim and admiration. 

The Truth About Utility

What makes a useful definition ? Originally I had a much more philosophically pretentious post semi-drafted for this, and I may still do that one separately. But various recent discussions have taken me down a very different path, one which might be more, err... useful. So let's start with this one and see if I ever get back to the nature-of-reality version in a future post. 

A good definition, I think, must surely be something which is widely applicable but also specific : things which happen frequently but not always. It should be readily distinguished from similar counter-examples. Crucially, it cannot be something which either never happens or always happens. It shouldn't be something which forbids itself entirely or makes it inevitable or ubiquitous. It should describe a specific thing that actually sometimes happens, or is at least conceptually valid and distinct from other, similar terms. 

What I see people doing is trying to make things true or false by setting their definition up in such a way that it cannot ever fail, and that to me seems like a mistake. This doesn't mean we can't have productive discussions, but it does, I think, impose some extremely unhelpful limitations. 

Let's do this one by example. First I'll look at cases where people define things such that they can't ever happen, and then the reverse, related case of defining them such that they're inevitable. Both in my view are counterproductive mistakes. They are terminology problems but they prevent us from getting at what we really mean, which is usually much more interesting.

1) Defining things out of existence

If we define something with such precision, such high standards, or such that it involves a logical contradiction that it can't ever be true, then I submit that this isn't a useful definition at all. Furthermore, it's likely not what we really mean when we use the term in everyday discourse.

Malevolence : Plato and other ancient philosophers help that nobody would knowingly do evil. I forget who it was who described it explicitly (possibly several people), but the basic idea was that if you knew something was wrong, you couldn't possibly do it. You might still carry out an immoral action, but you'd be misjudging, thinking that the gratification you would get would outweigh any negative consequences there might be for anyone else. Alternatively, you might do so only because you hadn't realised the existence, extent, or nature of those negative consequences.

I think this is a deeply mistaken view of humanity. As per the link, people certainly carry out heinous acts in full knowledge of their full consequences, sometimes this being the very reason for their behaviour rather than a side-effect. Or they may know but simply not care. But they aren't, I think  carrying out a mental calculus of where the balance lies. Even if they were, this would still make the word – or notion of wilful harm – meaningless. The point for most discussion is that people cause each other harm sometimes because they want this to happen, not out of ignorance. Anything more beyond this rapidly leads into such convoluted nuances that the definition collapses into uselessness. 

Or to put it another way : "Sure, he committed the murder, but it wasn't out of malice : that's impossible, so he must've done it because he mistakenly thought his pleasure at the victim's suffering would outweigh their actual suffering". 

To me this makes the word unproductively useless, trying to define the thing out of existence. Surely that points towards this meaning not being what we truly meant : the important thing is that people inflict harm on others for its own sake, and inferring anything further is best avoided altogether.

Altruism : In the opposite case, my partner likes to say that nobody is really altruistic. Everyone acts, she says, because they believe there will be some benefit to themselves, even if that reward is purely emotional. In the extreme case, someone might be give their own lives to save others, not because they thought the value of the lives they saved outweighs their own, but because of the fleeting emotional reward they themselves will get from knowing the others will live.

This too I think is surely putting more on the word than it can bear. The point of altruism, I'd say, is that we sometimes value others more than ourselves and act to bring a net benefit to them even at the expense of our own status. Start demanding that we get no emotional reward at all and again the term has been defined out of meaningful existence. This makes it utterly useless, and surely, therefore, this can't be what most of us mean most of the time when we use it. I'll qualify this a bit more later, but that general-case point is the one I want to focus on.

Knowledge and understanding : I've covered the nature of LLM-outputs several times, most recently here but also e.g. here and (tangentially) here. More on those more directly in a minute, but a closely related claim is whether they can be said to truly understand anything. I think they can, in the carefully qualified sense that a) they have access to some form of information; b) they form connections between different pieces of information; c) they act in a logical, coherent way to predict how things behave in novel situations. Not perfectly, it's true, but more interesting by far is that they do it at all. 

Now for sure, this is not the same sort of understanding that humans have. But its qualitative similarities, in my view, outweigh and are far more interesting than the quantitative differences between silicon and neural understanding. I think it's just not at all useful to say that "meaning only comes from humans ascribing this to the output". This is so inevitably necessary that it adds nothing useful to the discussion : well who else was going to be reading the output then ? And if you define "understanding" to be only a human thing, then it's tautologous that no non-human will ever have it. That's cheating.

2) Defining things into existence

We can now see how the reverse is also true : if we define a thing as being completely unavoidable, we won't get anywhere.

Hallucinations : See the links in the previous entry as this follows directly from the previous definition. I did initially agree that it was sensible to describe all LLM output as a hallucination, but I changed my mind some time ago. Given that they are now able to process complex (and multi-modal) information in a way that closely aligns with human expectations, and can in fact exceed our own predictive capacities at least some of the time, I now no longer think describing their output at purely hallucinatory makes much sense. 

It's more useful, I think, to say they're hallucinating (in their own peculiar way) when their output has no connection whatever to the input data or prompt. This is much more analogous to human hallucinations in which we see things which aren't there. I would still agree, provisionally, that LLMs treat all information has having a much more similar level of validity than humans do, and undeniably they have some qualitative as well as quantitative differences from human thought. But they are very clearly not purely fabricating stuff all the time : more often than not, they're processing their inputs quite sensibly.

Importantly, the claim that all LLM output is a hallucination is consistent with the notion that they don't understand anything. I'm not claiming incoherency here : I'm claiming that these definitions should be discarded because they aren't useful, not because there's any inherent problem as such. The alternative definitions I've suggested are, I think, better only because they are more flexible and specific, allowing us to describe things in more detail, not because they eliminate any inconsistency.

God : Don't say I'm not ambitious ! The old argument that god is necessarily perfect and perfection necessarily exists... well, surely this is the ultimate case of trying to assert truth by definition. God is a perfect what, exactly ? A perfect square ? A perfect teapot ? Well, if a perfect teapot exists, where is it ? Could it be Russel's Teapot, somewhere beyond Earth's orbit ? Surely not, because if it was perfect, it would be in my hands whenever I need it. But it isn't, and therefore the perfect teapot clearly does not exist. 

And if even the perfect teapot doesn't exist, I see no reason to say that the abstract concept of perfection itself – a Spinozan notion of God – also has to exist in any sense beyond a mental construct. Clearly, I can imagine what I think a perfect teapot should be like, but that has no further existence outside my head. There's no reason to think that perfection itself is any different.

So here too, "perfect" in the everyday sense does not mean the same thing as St. Anselm would have it mean. Nobody uses perfect to mean "something which must exist" : indeed, we often use it to describe things which can't exist precisely because they're perfect ! "Platonic ideal" might be one of Plato's better ideas here, if only in the concept : we can conceive of better examples of chairs and circles and virtues even if we can't bring them into being. That's generally how we use the word, to describe something specific in aspect, not the singularity-like God of the Upanishads. 

As far as the existence of God goes, and very much with my agnostic hat one, I think definitions here are of no help whatever. We can conceive of perfect examples of things we fundamentally do understand, like circles. But perfection itself ? That would require understanding all facets of existence, which as imperfect beings we simply can't do and never will. A general understanding of perfection is beyond our limitations : we can no more say that "god's perfection means he exists" than we can say what a perfect dinosaur would be like. The concept may simply be incomprehensible or it may not even make sense at all.

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That's my idea of a good definition then. It should be specific, flexible, distinct from alternatives, and describe things which occur at a finite rate (even if only conceptually). If a definition forbids itself from ever existing, or would always be true, then it has no use cases and should be discarded. Those kinds of definitions usually twist readily-comprehensible everyday meanings into something convoluted, unproductive, and useless.

I'll stress "usually" a little bit though as I don't say that the extremes don't matter at all. For example, what do we mean when we say we're know something or that we're certain of it ? Usually, that our own belief is well-formed and our confidence is beyond reasonable or routine doubt. We don't usually mean that we have found Truth Itself, that we can state our claim with literally zero chance of it being wrong, and that all unbelievers are evil and/or stupid. 

Like the case of purest selflessness, this kind of concept definitely does have value, but more in the philosophy classroom than the real world. The extreme cases let us frame our own actual beliefs and compare them to those of others, rather than providing useful, workable definitions in themselves. For example, we can all agree on what true certainty would actually mean, but to use the word more practically, we have to scale things back. That's where the discussions start to get interesting, trying to figure out the limits of our own underlying reasoning as well as that of the others in the debate. 

To a very large extent, I think the question of how we use a definition is very much the same as what we think it means at the most basic level. But then, others may have a different understanding. I don't always agree with the alternatives, but trying to figure them out is usually the fun bit.

Review : Folklore of Wales

Following on from Sarah Clegg's The Dead of Winter, I couldn't resist picking up another couple of short books on folklore. Both of which I devoured over Christmas, so let's start the New Year with the happy business of witches and whatnot.

The Review Bit

First up, Anne Ross' Folklore of Wales. The only appropriate adjective for this is... well, nice. It has a very distinctive style, an unusual mix of the academic, the readable narrative, and the unbearably twee : for one annual festivity she describes how "the sweet music of the harp would further enhance the happy occasion", without embarrassment. It takes some getting used to, but the clarity and simplicity of the text generally makes up for the often rose-tinted view of the people of the past. And Ross knows when to be lucid and when to be deliberately obscure, when to be literal and when to be quasi-mystical.

As Clegg noted, academics of Ross' generation tended to view the originators of folklore as being simplistic peasants, uncreative and dull, with all their wild beliefs being vestiges of ancient pagan religions rather than their own creations. Ross certainly does fall into this trap quite heavily, rarely acknowledging that largely illiterate people can still be crazily imaginative. She definitely infers too much that weird cults and practices must have been remnants of lost religions proper... but she doesn't lean into this too heavily. We don't get lectured here, with Ross largely concentrating on presenting folkloric beliefs rather than analysing them. Contrary to Clegg's view, it's also clear she loves her subject matter* dearly – on more than one occasion I had to wonder if she was a pagan herself.

* No lectures here on the word "Celtic" either, a word only delivered with lengthy apologies in many recent books. And to be fair, she does sometimes note that some ideas are wholly modern.

So yeah, it's nice. It's a short book but with plenty of illustrations and figures, covering a very wide breadth of all aspects of Welsh folklore. At ~£15 it's pricey for a 150 page paperback, and it would have helped if she didn't keep complaining about the lack of available space* – just add another 50 pages if you want to ! Perhaps the biggest problem is some chapters are rather unstructured, with no clear link between one topic and the next. But it's rare to find any section which is uninteresting, and overall it's well worth a read. A solid 7/10 from me.

* Two other things. She's weirdly horny for cranes (the birds), describing them as though they were near-miraculous and – for some unknown reason – able to run as fast as a horse (hint : they can't). And worryingly, she seems to think that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.

Wales, It Is A Silly Place

Right then, here's what I learned about my native country.

Commonly Celtic 

I've previously remarked on the similarities of pagan stories across Europe, but I wasn't aware of just how similar Welsh beliefs are with other traditions in Britain. For example the famous "Scottish" Kelpie also occurs in Welsh folklore as the Ceffl Dwr and appears to be essentially the same type of beastie : a water-dwelling horse, sometimes with shapeshifting abilities, that lures the unwary to their deaths. Good marketing on behalf of the Scots, but a bit unfair on the rest of us. Quit hogging the water horses !

I'll get my own deadly water horse, with blackjack, and hookers...

Fairies also occur throughout Sottish, Irish and Welsh myths in very similar form* : smallish (about three feet tall as a rule, though larger in the older stories), chaotic neutral (capable of both good and evil but primarily concerned with doing their own thing), living underground (though again not always in the earlier Welsh stories, where they seem to inhabit more of a parallel world than an underground kingdom), highly magical, and with a distinctive tendency to manipulate time.

* Although it should be noted that the Irish have specific mythological tales describing their origin. I'm not aware of any comparable Welsh stories, with our fairies just being a thing.

There are also soothsayers who are described almost like shamans, with similar ritualistic performances and a dress code not at all unlike what you'd expect for an ancient wizard (quoting third hand, with similar Scottish practises described elsewhere in the text) :

Whenever he assumed to practise the black art, he put on a most grotesque dress, a cap of sheepskin with a high crown, bearing a plume of pigeon's feathers, and a coat of unusual pattern, with broad hems, and covered with talismanic characters. In his hand he had a whip, the thong of which was made of the skin of an eel and the handle of bone.

He certainly sounds like an intimidating chap if nothing else.

Ross also points out more specific similarities between the Welsh Arthur and the Irish hero Finn MacCool. Both lead warbands (early Arthur is not even a king; later Arthur is an Emperor), both invade the otherworld, both command animals, both fight magical pigs*, and both are said to be sleeping rather than dead. She also notes, albeit a bit more tangentially, the similarity of Arthur and the Welsh for bear (arth), as well as the name of the magician Math (of the Mabinogion) and the Irish word for prophet.

* I know wild boar can be dangerous beasts indeed, but still, my modern notion of the farmyard varieties just doesn't accept them as much more threatening than Peppa Pig.

Not that Arthur is just a Welsh version of an Irish hero or the other way around, however. A final interesting suggestion from Ross (and others) is that the linguistic similarity suggests Arthur was originally a Celtic bear god, though this feels like quite the leap of faith to me. Regardless, the Arthurian traditions throughout the British Isles (and indeed France, as we shall see) all have unique attributes, and the English Arthur is no more the Welsh Arthur than he is secretly Finn MacCool in disguise. Perhaps they had a common point of origin, perhaps not... Arthur's origins and evolution are nothing if not complex*. Perhaps it's all just the result of similar cultures exploring similar themes.

* And Merlin's too. In a variation on the Vortigern tale of needing a child without a father, Ross gives a version where the locals set the far more realistic standards that the father only had sex with the mother once. There are even Welsh accounts where he's not Welsh at all, which is not what I expected from ancient legends.

Of course, the original Arthur was Welsh though. That's just common sense.

Monsters in the mist

Not all supernatural tales are as sophisticated or as pan-Brittanic as Arthur. Some are distinctly Welsh*, with a particular focus here on creatures of the mist. Of these, some are widely mentioned but little described, such as the Grey King who appears to have power to control mountain fog, but whether he's a figure of malevolence or just a personification of natural forces is... ahem... hazy. Sinister might be the best word, rather than outright evil.

* Although not entirely. Ross doesn't do a detailed comparison of everything, so it's possible that some of these are found elsewhere as well.

Far less ambiguous is the torrent spectre, a ghostly giant that dwells in streams and delights in causing deadly floods. Oddly, Ross says nothing of interest at all about giants more generally, which is strange as  they appear to be far more common in Welsh legends and folklore than our more famous dragons. She's also a bit confusing with the afanc, the strange crocodile-beaver water monster than does classic monster things, but according to the story here also seduces local maidens... whereas another version of the same local tale I found online says that the poor girl volunteered herself as bait – a far more heroic interpretation.

Some descriptions of the afanc also have it more straightforwardly as a water-dragon. Of the more familiar land-dwelling dragons, every book on Celtic folklore harps on about the incident under Vortigern's castle which gave rise to the big red one on the flag. Ross, to her great credit, gives another dragon story I'd never heard before. The legend says that snakes who drank women's milk and ate communion bread would be transformed into winged serpents or dragons. She relates one particular tale of a nest of such creatures at Moel Bentyrch, where the locals erected a stone pillar. This was not to commemorate the story but allegedly as an active defence against the monsters : covered with scarlet ribbon (which they supposedly hated) and concealing iron spikes in the hope they'd impale themselves on it.

Other creatures are less surreal and more straightforwardly horrific. My two favourite are the cwm annwn (the hounds of hell) and the gwarch y rhibyn (the hag of the mist). The hounds were ferocious white beasts whose appearance and howls presaged death, but they were also said to bite and even kill people, disappearing into the earth at the spot the grave would be dug. The gwarch was even worse. A banshee-like hideous hag that appeared in the mountain mists to rattle on windows, she evolved in the tellings into an almost Balrog-like monstrosity. More on both of these two when I review the next book.

This is getting much too scary, but fortunately some monsters are altogether weirder. Monstrous water-cats are apparently another widespread concept, of which the Cath Palug is surely both the strangest and the silliest. Arising from yet another magical pig hunted by Arthur, which went around birthing a whole assortment of different creatures before the cat, British stories have this later slain by one of Arthur's knights. Not so the French, however, who have the cat killing Arthur and going on to assume the throne. Which is quite possibly a case of deliberate mockery of a folk hero, and not very nice at all.

Believing in believing ?

All this raises the classic question of whether anyone ever really believed in any of this, or if later people just mistook fiction for documentation. Surely the Cath Palug becoming king was never believed by anyone at all and always understood to be fiction, but what of the rest ?

Here things get more interesting. Ross is explicit that many believed in some of this within living memory, and indeed a few still do – as communities, even, rather than the odd crazy loon. She recalls children around Bala being actively scared of a ghostly pig that would emerge at Halloween (best episode of Peppa ever), but also adults who believed in various lake monsters. There are even eyewitness accounts of fairies well into modern times, and people leaving milk out for them in living memory – enough to demonstrate that people took some of this stuff very seriously indeed. The gwarch also appears to have been a figure of genuine fear, not a story to scare naughty children with.

It wasn't just monsters either. Other supernatural ideas also appear to have been widely believed, especially omens and prophecies. The number of rituals for divination was huge : burning candles to see when the flame went out to check for ill health, or checking which way a rooster crowing at night happened to be looking*, or seeing the future through holes in bones, planting hemp at crossroads, and all manner of other bizarre practises and a myriad of variations on a theme. Basically anything you see on a cheap TV show featuring fortune-telling – yeah, someone did that. There are legions of examples of how such seemingly arbitrary rites were exactly that : a way to make a random decision when there was just no way to make a properly informed choice**. 

* Quite who would be able to get up in time to check this accurately isn't specified.

** In relation to the sheer randomness of it all, two examples I particularly like. First, the notion that eating the flesh of an eagle could allow you to cure shingles (and/or grant prophetic powers) by breathing and spitting on the affected area, an ability than some said would be retained for nine generations. Secondly how snakeskin could be used to cure essentially anything, including granting invulnerability. I mean, you can see how some weird ideas stick around a lot longer than they should, but you'd think people would eventually notice that consuming the ashes of snakeskin wasn't making them invincible.

One of the most eerie beliefs was that of the corpse candle. A traveller sees a blue night wandering the fields at night which goes into a house and into the room of someone who'll be found dead the next morning. Similarly, blue lights represented the soul in other, happier but equally weird circumstances, such as girls letting down a woollen ladder hoping to reveal a future lover. The idea seems to have been that their soul would climb the ladder as a blue light and then reveal themselves. 

There were also wells used for both healing and cursing, or even weather control by dropping in pieces of quartz to cause storms. It's interesting to chart how some wells began as extremely holy places but later became sites of evil used exclusively for cursing, dropping in charms and spells in the hope they'd summon some supernatural power to inflict harm on their targets. Many spells appear to be simple things, not much more than writing down what you wanted to happen and dropping it in the appropriate places. While this began as a pagan practise, the rituals evolved to become fully Christian : a sort of modified prayer would be written, explicitly calling on the power of God or Jesus or whatnot. And Ross notes that some such wells only gained their reputation in the modern era, acknowledging that not all folklore is the end product of centuries of tradition.

Conclusions

Ross does, however, state that we're likely now at the very end of such beliefs. She goes on something of a stock rant about the decline of society, how television is corrupting the young and the instant gratification of big-city living is eroding the value of storytelling and village life. It's not at all convincing, and I'd be willing to bet such laments have been made since the first caveman decided to build a hut.

Are such beliefs changing ? Yes, absolutely. They always do. It's difficult to think that we'll ever return to thinking that standing stones would take themselves down to the nearest lake for a drink, or that eating eagles would grant healing powers – and in some such cases, it's far better to let these ideas die (both for our own well-being and that of the eagles). Presumably, Ross wouldn't have felt so nostalgic had she been a bit more skeptical of the idea that most local customs are truly ancient.

That said, I concede that Ross presents a decent case for a more community-oriented view of the past. Not in the meddling, interfering sense we see in cases of witch hunts, but in the common activities open to all. These days we have essentially Christmas as the only major annual communal event, perhaps also New Year, with the others (Halloween, Easter, a few others) being much lesser. In contrast Ross describes festivals of similar magnitude to Christmas happening throughout the year, even just a century ago. Nowadays we have a great deal more activities available for like-minded people to participate in, but fewer that act for community unification.

Are we losing the sense of magic though ? I'm not so sure. If we accept that folk traditions are, in many cases, not ancient, then it seems to point towards how people think at a fundamental level. Two thousand years of the Christian faith was unable to stop people going from door to door with a horse's skull to engage in a rap-battle with the neighbours... I suspect at any point in history one would witness beliefs changing, some dying out while new ones spring up. As in Hogfather, there is a fixed quantity of belief in the universe. You can't kill crazy : if the gods are dead and we have killed them, then – sorry atheists – some other mad idea will simply emerge to fill the gap.

Review : The Witches (III)

It's time to wrap up my rundown of Stacy Schiff's The Witches. In part one we looked at what made Salem so unique : the weirdness of the magical claims and the extent to which they spread throughout the community. In part two we began to see why this was so different from the usual situation in which one or two witches might be accused from time to time and then nothing much for years at a time. The courts were flawed and corrupt, twisting evidence to suit their purpose, allowing suspicion of the procedure itself to be viewed as evidence as witchcraft. Suspects were housed in appalling conditions but granted freedom if they confessed, which is perhaps the only reason that the execution rate wasn't very much higher – but at the same time explains the extremely high accusation and conviction rate.

In this final post, let's go into the underlying ideology at work. If the courts allowed and even encouraged the crisis, it still would never have happened at all without some deep-seated beliefs in absolute nonsense. We'll end on what happened afterwards, but first, we need to turn our attention to just what the hell was going on.

The Problems Of Being Holier Than Thou

Schiff, it must be said, presents a more believable picture of Puritan life than Gaskill – if conditions were as harsh as he claimed, everyone would simply have died. In Schiff's account the general state of the populace is more nuanced. Yes, they worked fucking hard and life was tough. But they did have leisure time. Taverns might be frowned upon but they existed, and life was not so wholly joyless as Gaskill claims : people might even laugh and joke from time to time.

It was also unavoidably corrupt. With a devout and perverted belief in a meritocracy*, wealth was a symbol of moral virtue and poverty its opposite. The poor did not deserve charity because they were by definition sinners. This seems to have been a sincerely held belief, not merely an excuse to keep those on top in their favoured position : the idea of equality was dismissed as literally Satanic. They had an intensely conscious moral belief that their batshit nonsense was righteousness. 

* That is, that society was meritocratic rather than that it should be meritocratic, or that any steps needed to be taken to make it so. 

To that end, even the wealthy were, impossibly, all but forbidden from actually enjoying their wealth. This level of repression and hierarchy led inevitably to widespread abuse by the civic leaders, sometimes physically and sexually, of their downtrodden flock. In an environment which was already challenging just to survive, this wasn't helping anyone's sanity.

Nor, for that matter, were the all-pervasive judgements, the "surveillance society of the soul" as Paul Lay described it. In but one of many social paradoxes (good grief these people were a right bunch of shits*), this was a group who had deliberately sought out a remote location where they could freely judge each other without their community being judged by others. The continuous judgements, the relentless meddling in everyone else' daily lives, led to a climate of fear. If there were happier moments, the general environment was that of a complete dystopia. They were obsessed with justice, after a fashion, but only in the punitive rather than the moral-philosophical sense : they wanted to inflict judgements, not enforce moral standards. Plato would have torn his hair out in disgust, and then probably punched them all in the face.

* Calvinism, I think, might be one of the most self-destructive systems of thought every devised. I have a lot of sympathy and respect for the idea that the world has an unknown, godly component to it, but I think of Puritanism as little better than a terrorist sect.

All this raises the distinct possibility that the accusations and confessions were, in part, not only the result of social contagions. Some of them may have been the result of actual, medical-grade hallucinations : they may really have believed they saw some of the things they claimed to have seen. A not-so-guilty pleasure for me at the moment is the Uncanny podcast, and I have to wonder how many modern-day supernatural claims can be explained by a similar process. Certainly the belief in even the most preposterous magical claims was sincere; if some folklore was really never any more than a story, then witchcraft is one case where the beliefs were absolutely solid : one unfortunate woman was executed for selling chickens after happening to turn up after a magical summoning ritual. 

And once again, hypocrisy was rife. They believed magic was real but forbade its use. As Keith Thomas pointed out, by removing the option of counter-magic, the only recourse was to deal with the practitioners. But there's another level of irony at work in this which speaks to a deeper fear. Puritans, as a persecuted people, now became Nietzschean monsters, themselves the persecutors of the lowest of (their own) society. Perhaps this illustrates the difference sorts of fear felt throughout various demographics more broadly. It's one thing to be afraid for yourself and to want to protect your loved ones, but it's quite another to be afraid of other people and want to oppress them.

What didn't help matters was that analytical but uncritical mindset. They took the apparent presence of a vast throng of demonic witches not as evidence of their own corruption, but in their own self-importance : after all, Satan wouldn't bother if they weren't so godly that he needed to destroy them. It felt good to be pursued by demons because that only showed how holy they were.

What a bunch of absolutely contemptible fuckwits. But I digress.

Nor did it help that their moral world view was hugely over-simplified. Essentially all evils were attributable to a single source : Satan. This meant that any wrongdoing had but a single cause, an enormously binary "if you're not with us you're against us" view of morality. Small wonder that questioning the judicial process raised immediate suspicions that the critic was themselves likely a witch. These people may not have been coherent, but they were at least self-consistent.

One final paradox concerns the community views on gender. In this case the victims were predominantly but not overwhelmingly female, something I've neglected despite Schiff giving much excellent commentary here. For the sake of space, I'll reduce this to noting that the expected role of women wasn't exactly that of a modern "trad wife" incel nonsense, but it did inflame male insecurities. Women didn't have a lifestyle that was physically any easier than that of men, and could be both oppressed (with limited rights of speech and power, with the entire town leadership being exclusively male) but also independent (running their own businesses and speaking out regardless of what the law permitted). Again, it makes sense that in having a more confined social role, women were necessarily more likely to deviate, and correspondingly more likely to be seen as susceptible to Satan's power. Everyone, to the Puritan way of thinking, was guilty of something, women most of all, and calling it witchcraft only gave that guilt a name.

In short, these people were completely mad.

Epilogue : The Aftermath

Salem began with the spectacular testimony of an enslaved Indian woman (eventually freed without a trial), from which followed a rapid, all-consuming explosion, an obsession with eliminating all witches at all costs. It so dominated the village that essential work was at real risk of not being done, which in those situations began to present a danger to life.

What Schiff doesn't analyse much is why Salem in particular went to such extremes. Gaskill noted that more cosmopolitan, tolerant, liberal places in America had no such problems with witchcraft, or at least very much less – and certainly no risk of the runaway situation which happened in Salem. But this does not explain why only Salem went into a near-catastrophe : there were other Puritan colonies in the area, but they didn't fall into such an all-consuming passion for self-destruction.

There are at least two possible contributing factors. First, Schiff notes that the Salem villagers were especially quarrelsome and given to pettiness, not willing to help each other, prone to responding over-harshly to the merest slight. Given the small size of the population, the nature of individual characters could potentially be a major issue here : if just one or two of the town leaders had been a bit more sympathetic, a bit less willing to inflame the worst tendencies of the common people, things might well have turned out very differently.

The second factor may be political. The village was intensely conflicted in its loyalties, seeing themselves as a fully independent offspring of Britain whereas the British very much regarded them as a minor and subservient colony. The colonists felt a profound need to demonstrate their independence as a legal entity, and prominent court trials could show the world that Salem was no petty backwater that was dependent on a larger government for its survival.

The trials ended as swiftly as they had begun. In Schiff's narrative, there's a bit of a wobble in the last couple of months, a little more skepticism creeping through... and then they ended completely. As with witch hunts back in the motherland, in part the sheer number of witches being accused eventually made people question the whole process. It took time, but whereas trying (say) one or two witches per year might be sustainable indefinitely – indeed accusations persisted even into the 20th century – the idea of hundreds began to be seen as preposterous. A combination of mounting concern and the practical need to get back to work brought the proceedings to a sharp but anti-climactic end. It was, ultimately, a self-limiting problem, but not before nineteen people had died and hundreds more been accused of wild, murderous intent.

Given the magnitude of the event, it might be thought that a return to normality was all but impossible. In fact it seemed to happen swiftly, perhaps in part out of the pressing needs of manual labour. Even so, the accused (and the convicted, remembering that confessions were by far the best route to avoiding sentences) and the accusers now found themselves having to learn to get along all over again.

It wasn't easy. Sometimes reconciliation was absolutely impossible. Some left, others died. Some pulled together. In one way the general opinion did an important pivot : suddenly everyone realised that maybe those thought to be bewitched were not, by definition, reliable witnesses. Perhaps also the trials had become self-sustaining, and by putting an end to them, most ordinary people felt much less need to accuse their neighbours even if they might privately still believe them guilty. 

One of the key issues that had dominated the trials was whether Satan could deceive the innocent. Like whether spectral evidence (hallucinations of a single person) should be admitted, this was a highly controversial topic. The issue was that if Satan could affect the unwilling, then his power would be implausibly great, a rival God that undermined Calvinist predestination. The solution was an uneasy compromise : Satan could sometimes deceive the innocent but not usually. It was all very ad-hoc, corrupt enough to excuse the friends of judges while allowing mass convictions. But perhaps this too gave a little wedge, an excuse for the accusers, after things had calmed down, to say that the accused weren't as guilty as they'd thought.

Any notion that it was the accusers fault just wasn't on the table. Some key antagonists did, eventually, change their minds. Initial apologies stopped short of admitting responsibility – exactly as in the case of modern politicians, barely apologies at all : "I'm sorry if you feel offended that we executed some innocents as well" sort of thing. Other key voices never wavered from their fervent belief that everything they had done was necessary and right, though only a very few indeed actually thought the trials should continue. It was all very awkward. 

There was a distinct undertone to the whole thing, an unspoken suspicion lingering in the air that maybe we've made a horrible mistake. Or perhaps more likely that they were about to make a horrible mistake : thank goodness we only executed all the guilty ones and stopped ourselves from carrying on, we'd have gone too far if we'd done that.

Being able to utter this out loud was too terrible a prospect at the immediate end of the trials; it took a full century to manage this. None of the accusers ever faced justice : the atrocity was only recognised for what it was long after everyone had died. But even though these people were fantastically stupid, they weren't simple caricatures. At least one of the main accusers left a substantial fund to help Indian students, hardly the action of someone purely intent on inflicting harm. Which again makes it all the more disturbing : that people did actually think through (albeit badly) their actions and conclude that they were doing the right thing.

---

I've talked many times about how politically we can sometimes feel on the edge of chaos. Not all journalism is sensationalist rhetoric (although much of it is)... some of the more hyperbolic stuff does accurately reflect what can happen if things go on unchecked.

Salem represents a prime example of just how true this can be, how a narrow difference in thinking can lead to disaster. The villagers were not, in a sense, unintelligent. They were logical and analytical, but not curious or critical. They saw a phenomena and explained it according to their own world view, never stopping to question their assumptions for a moment. They had a devastatingly binary view of reality and morality : anything not of God was of the Devil, anyone who didn't think like them was highly suspicious. They allowed themselves little in the way of reward for following a lifestyle of almost unrelenting discipline, but ensured that everyone who failed to uphold their standards was delivered the full measure of blame.

Things twist so much when you allow room for an opinion rather than facts, to have a belief but allow room for doubt. It's not about whether you belief the Universe is run by a big beardy man in the sky or a collection of electrical fields, it's about how you think people who believe differently should be treated. How we respond to each other is, sociologically, much more important that what we ourselves personally feel. But the moment we make those feelings for facts, the minute we start thinking our position unassailable, the more likely we are to slide into intolerance.

Salem also shows how, even in a seemingly worse-case scenario of ideological and political freefall, hitting rock bottom is by no means guaranteed. Success is not final and failure is not fatal; most complaints about contemporary British politics are borne of a woeful, deplorable lack of imagination. Salem is what happens when you really take the brakes off, allow that imagination freedom with almost nothing to temper it. Don't come complaining about inheritance taxes for farmers to me, sunshine.

The pessimistic take from Salem is that the witch hunts went on for as long as they did : as Schiff put it, nobody was guilty except the accusers. The optimistic take is that they did stop : the town could have collapsed completely, but it didn't. And the ugly take is that no justice was ever meted out to the demented fuckwits who believed in ludicrous nonsense, who maintained that everything they'd done was correct even as they stopped doing it. They were never at the receiving end of the judicial system they were so keen to inflict on others. In the end, Salem, perhaps, is an illustration of how if there isn't justice for all, there isn't justice for anyone.