Abstract
I do not want to begin these reflections on the “demoniac conspiracy” without acknowledging my debt to Norman Cohn, who, in Europe’s Inner Demons clearly explained the conditions of the birth of a witches’ conspiracy myth, and, in particular, highlighted all the elements that make this myth—at least partly—one of the avatars of the avatars of a repressive ideology aimed at other groups. “In most societies;’ he says, “to say that a group practices incest, worships genitals, kills and eats children, amounts to saying that it is an incarnation of the anti-human” (Cohn, 1976, p. 12). These imaginary practices, which appear in accusations directed against the first Christians, Gnostics, Jews and Templars, were in fact also attributed to witches. But I would like here to advance some hypotheses concerning the specificity of the elaboration of the belief in a “witches’ conspiracy” and of the repression that accompanied it.
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Jacques-Chaquin, N. (1987). Demoniac Conspiracy. In: Graumann, C.F., Moscovici, S. (eds) Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy. Springer Series in Social Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4618-3_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4618-3_4
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