This clergyman Joseph Glanvill from which Poe quotes , interesting that he was both a religious natural philosopher who also made a great effort to champion the belief in demons , witches & spirits in a valiant attempt to resusitate this superstition back to the religious norm . This was being challenged at that time in the middle 17th century by certain so called atheistic thinkers. So Glanville went about writing and becoming known for :
en.wikipedia.org
Glanville is known also for Sadducismus Triumphatus (1681), which decried scepticism about the existence and supernatural power of witchcraft and contained a collection of seventeenth-century folklore about witches. In England men such as Boyle, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth and Joseph Glanvill battled to stabilize belief in the existence and operations of apparitions and spirits as part of a wider drive to uphold religion, authority and tradition. [16]
Imagine that , as church lady would say isnt that special , lol, cause later we find Glanvill's work so influenced Cotton Mather to pursue the Salem Witch trials :
Sadducismus Triumphatus deeply influenced Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), written to justify the Salem witch trials in the following year.
Here basically you have Brumar and all religionist's philosophy or sacred fears in a nutshell , those beliefs are so sacred and must be upheld for all the good they do for without which there's only social chaos , like nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over , we must have order & you must take your medication !! ;o)
These and others ( Richard Baxter, Meric Casaubon, George Sinclair) believed that the tide of scepticism on witchcraft, setting in strongly by about 1670, could be turned back by research and sifting of the evidence. [17] Like More, Glanvill believed that the existence of spirits was well documented in the Bible, and that the denial of spirits and demons was the first step towards atheism. Atheism led to rebellion and social chaos and therefore had to be overcome by science and the activities of the learned. Israel cites a letter from More to Glanvill, from 1678 and included in Sadducismus Triumphatus, in which he says that followers of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza use scepticism about "spirits and angels" to undermine belief in the Scripture mentioning them. |
