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Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds: summary and chapter guide
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What is Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds about?AI-assisted
Mass delusion springs from desire and imitation, not from any schemer's lie
One question drives the book: why do whole peoples believe and act on what is plainly false? Mackay answers by case series rather than theory, moving from money manias (Mississippi and South-Sea schemes, tulips) through prophecy, alchemy and magnetism, witch and poison panics, the Crusades, duelling, haunted houses, admired criminals, fashions in hair, and relic-worship. The recurring mechanism stays constant: a desire — gain, health, foreknowledge, reverence — meets imitation, staged ritual and rumour; authority then sanctions and enlarges what it should check; procedure manufactures the proof the belief lacks; and the delusion lasts exactly as long as it escapes a decisive test. Fraud is a symptom of credulous demand, not its origin, and blame afterwards falls on scapegoats rather than on the public that shared the appetite. Only patient physical investigation, a fixed date, or a demanded delivery dissolves such beliefs; law, sermons and ridicule rarely do. Mackay's verdict is that discontent drives both civilisation and its follies, that delusions migrate from one domain to the next instead of dying, and that the nineteenth century's boasted march of intellect is refuted by their survival.
A fable for the whole bookAI-assisted
One story that carries the book’s central idea — and an honest note on where the story breaks.
The sealed jar: believers needed only the promise, never the proof
Once there was a valley where a stranger arrived carrying a sealed clay jar. Inside, he said, was a drop of the Deathless Water — one swallow would cure any sickness and show any buyer his own future. He never opened the jar. He only set it on a draped table each evening, lit two lamps behind it so the clay glowed, hummed low while the crowd leaned in, and sold paper tokens that promised a swallow 'in the fullness of time.' The first buyer, a baker, felt his aching back loosen the moment he paid, and said so loudly; by the next market day his neighbours were buying tokens not to drink but to resell, since each day's token fetched more than the last. A trader began printing tokens of his own. The valley's chief, who held a sheaf of tokens himself, declared the jar a public treasure and made doubting it a punishable slander; a court was set up where the only question asked of a doubter was whether he had spoken against the Water, and every doubter, pressed hard enough, said yes — and each confession was read aloud as fresh proof. A shepherd girl asked when, exactly, the jar would be opened. The stranger answered that the hour was written in the stars and not for her. So one night she did a dull thing: she sat beside the table until the lamps burned out, lifted the jar, and found it stoppered with wax over nothing but dry sand. She carried the sand to the square at noon. The tokens were waste within an hour. The valley then hanged the token-printer, pardoned the chief, and never mentioned that the baker's back had been cured by his own hope. Three years later the same valley queued for a magnetic belt.
What the story stands for
| In the story | In the book |
|---|---|
| The sealed jar never opened, and the opening hour 'written in the stars' | Escape from any decisive test — the secret never shown, the prophecy undated, so the claim stays permanently unfalsifiable |
| The shepherd girl sitting through the night and carrying out the sand | Patient investigation and the study of past error — a fixed date or physical examination, not sermon or denunciation, dissolves the belief |
| Draped table, lamps behind the clay, the low humming | Staged ritual and manufactured rumour, which produces the very effect then counted as evidence |
| The baker's loosened back | Power of imagination over the body, which makes the postulated Deathless Water superfluous |
| Buyers who purchase tokens to resell rather than to drink | The greater-fool trade and fictitious value — participants need not believe the scheme, only expect a buyer |
| The trader printing his own tokens | Paper credit outrunning coin, and commerce in credulity, where credulous demand manufactures its own supply |
| The chief declaring the jar a public treasure and punishing doubt | Authority as amplifier of folly, legitimising and enlarging a mania it should check |
| The court whose single question plus pressure yields identical confessions read as corroboration | Procedure that manufactures its own proof, shielding the belief from refutation |
Where the fable breaks
The fable distorts by making the delusion hollow at the centre and the test clean and single: one jar, one night's watching, one handful of sand, one girl who is believed at noon. The book's version has no such centre — the manias run across money, prophecy, alchemy, witchcraft, crusading and relics at once, driven by desires (gain, health, foreknowledge, reverence) that are themselves pure or universal rather than frauds, and the book insists accurate warnings are socially unwelcome and change nothing, so a girl with sand would more likely be shamed or tried than heard. Nor can a fable carry the lethal scale of the real machinery — statutes, torture and ordeals that killed thousands over centuries — or the book's unresolved tensions: that publicity both spreads a craze and cures it, that coercion both inflames belief and compels conformity, that leaders are denied creative power yet credited with a crusade's peak, and that sound nursing beside the ritual competes with imagination for the same cures. The book's own evidence is anecdote from a few European centuries with motives read backwards from outcomes; a single tidy anecdote repeats that limitation rather than escaping it.
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds: the core arguments
10 theses the book defends, in the order the argument needs them.
- Manias are produced by collective avarice and imitation rather than by a single schemer's fraud, and publicising a craze or crime multiplies it instead of deterring it.
“He understood the monetary question better than any man of his day; and if his system fell with a crash so tremendous, it was not so much his fault as that of the people amongst whom he had erected it.”
Money Mania.—The Mississippi SchemeRead in context → - Speculative value is manufactured by jobbers and rumour rather than discovered in trade or earnings, and participants need not believe the scheme — only expect a greater fool to buy from them.
- Paper credit is sound only while notes stay redeemable and is wrecked by arbitrary over-issue, not by the theory itself; government and parliament legitimise and enlarge a mania, while accurate warnings are socially unwelcome and change nothing.
- A delusion survives exactly as long as it escapes a decisive test — believers fit vague prophecy backwards onto events already known — and it is a fixed date or patient physical investigation, not prayer, exorcism or denunciation, that destroys it.
- Lethal persecution was machinery rather than mere popular panic: statute made the offence triable outside ordinary proof, torture and rigged ordeals manufactured the corroboration, and prosecution itself bred more of what it punished.
- Scripture, doctrine and leaders do not create delusions but corroborate existing ones, letting a superstition blaze out with lethal confidence — and the Crusades are the supreme case because gain, excitement, imitation, politics and religion acted at once.
- Belief, not any transmitted agent, produced the cures of magnetisers from Paracelsus to Mesmer, so their own doctrine of binding the idea makes the postulated fluid superfluous.
- Unequal or unenforced justice is what lets a vice become epidemic, and once the practice is fashionable participants cease to feel it as wrong and seek occasions for it to escape shame.
- Delusions begin in pure and universal affections and go wrong morally rather than intellectually — admiration forgets that goodness is part of greatness — while credulous demand manufactures its own supply, making forgery and imposture symptoms rather than origins.
- Human discontent and vanity are at once the engine of civilisation and the generator of its follies; delusions migrate from alchemy to magnetism rather than die, so their survival into the nineteenth century refutes the boasted march of intellect, and folly deserves study rather than contempt.
Chapter by chapter
Every chapter is on this page: how the argument unfolds, its key claims, common misreadings and key concepts. Pick one from the list.
Money Mania.—The Mississippi Scheme
If Law's bank worked so well, what exactly turned it into the Mississippi mania?
How Money Mania.—The Mississippi Scheme unfoldsAI-assisted
The opening: a man and a vacuum. Mackay begins by naming his subject and immediately refusing the easy verdict. John Law, he insists, was neither knave nor madman but a man who understood money better than any contemporary — his error was theoretical, not moral: he could not foresee that public confidence, like public mistrust, swells almost without limit. Having set that frame, Mackay sketches the man (a Scottish youth, gambling years, a duel and flight, land-bank proposals shopped around Europe) and then, crucially, the hole he fell into. France after Louis XIV carried a debt of some 3,000 million livres against a revenue of 145 million, and the earlier remedies had made it worse — a recoinage that stripped a fifth of the metal from everyone who held it, and a special tribunal against financiers whose fines mostly ended up decorating courtiers. Over this sat a regent who saw that something must be done and signed papers without reading them. The opening's logic is that the vacuum came first; Law was merely what rushed into it.
The development: a sound principle and its fatal success. The chapter's first movement is, oddly, a vindication. Law's 1716 bank issued notes payable at sight in the coin current when they were issued — which made them proof against the government's own habit of debasement. Within a year those notes stood at a fifteen per cent premium while the state's billets d'état were discounted by 78.5 per cent, and Mackay presents the comparison deliberately: the principle worked. But he immediately names the cost of that success — it convinced the regent that paper could replace metal altogether. From there the escalation is continuous rather than sudden: monopolies, the bank made royal, a resisting parliament crushed, and the Mississippi company floated on the bank's borrowed credit. A promised 200-livre dividend on a 500-livre share drew at least 300,000 applications for 50,000 shares; when 300,000 more were created to absorb 1,500 million of national debt, three times the amount would have been subscribed. The frenzy fills the streets around Law's residences, and Mackay lets the social comedy run — the illusory, dazzling prosperity of Paris, D'Horn's execution puncturing it — before the arithmetic reasserts itself.
The turn: the mechanism that eats itself, and force that destroys what it defends. The hinge is the over-issue. While Law controlled the bank, Mackay notes, issues never exceeded sixty millions; above 1,500 millions were fabricated after the crown took charge, when all payments were ordered in paper between February and the end of May. On that coincidence of timing he lays the blame on the regent rather than Law — while honestly conceding that Law's own view is unknown, and calling him culpably weak for helping the inundation along. Then comes the quiet mechanism that hollows the system out: the shrewdest operators judged prices could not keep rising, swapped notes for gold and silver, and shipped the metal abroad. Each conversion removed the backing that made the remaining notes credible, so the structure thinned fastest at the moment it looked richest — Conti's wagon-loads of specie being only the loudest instance. The government's response supplies the chapter's bitterest irony: it tried to compel belief. Caps on private coin holdings, payments to informers, servants turned against masters, courts filled with confiscations, and finally the 21 May edict halving the notes. Each measure announced that the paper could not stand alone, and so subtracted from the very trust it meant to restore.
The collapse: arithmetic that could not be politically survived. Mackay sets 2,600 millions of notes against less than half that sum in coin — the gap had to close somehow — and then shows that no available action could close it. Parliament refused to register the May edict; the outcry forced its restoration within a week, and that reversal destroyed the government's own authority more thoroughly than the original error had. What follows is deliberately rendered as physical consequence rather than policy: the bank's suspension of specie, Law's dismissal, mob violence, D'Aguesseau's recall, notes burned in public, copper small change, a man shot at the bank on 9 July and fifteen crushed to death eight days later. A last attempt to prop the Company with a maritime monopoly was abandoned because it would have ruined every other merchant in France — the system had run out of room to borrow from the future. Songs and caricatures finish the work, and Law leaves France almost penniless.
The close: reckoning, exile, and a mirror held up to England. The ending is an accounting in two registers. Officially, the visa and the Chambre de l'Arsenal sift the financial wreckage and purge officials; D'Argenson falls and is spat upon after death. Personally, Mackay returns to his opening thesis and submits Law's own conduct as evidence for it: Law had kept his gains in French land, declined the money the regent offered him, and left for Brussels with a single diamond, his estates afterwards confiscated — pawning the stone, living by play, dying poor in Venice. A man who had meant to defraud would not have ended that way; the catastrophe therefore reflects a nation's greed more than one man's dishonesty, though Mackay still grants that Law committed many faults. A gentler coda lets the brother be released and found a family — and then the chapter turns outward, pointing to England's contemporaneous mania, milder in its consequences, which hands the reader straight into the next chapter and quietly makes the French case general rather than national.
One distinction worth keeping. Mackay's indictment is not of paper money. While issues stayed under sixty millions and every note was payable on demand, the paper traded above the state's own securities. The ruin came from notes fabricated with nothing set aside to redeem them — and, correspondingly, it could not have been saved by firmness, since redenominating notes rearranges figures without conjuring the missing metal.
Key claims, with the lines that support them
France's wrecked finances and a regent who hated business opened the door for Law's project.
The author sets the scene with a debt of 3,000 million livres against a revenue of 145 million, and shows that the earlier remedies made things worse: a recoinage that stripped a fifth of the metal from holders, and a special court against financiers whose fines largely ended up enriching courtiers. The regent saw that something must be done but signed papers unexamined, so any plan that looked easy was welcome.
“The national debt amounted to 3000 millions of livres, the revenue to 145 millions, and the expenses of government to 142 millions per annum; leaving only three millions to pay the interest upon 3000 millions.”
Money Mania.—The Mississippi SchemeRead in context →
Law's early bank genuinely worked, because notes payable at sight in the coin current when they were issued were proof against the government's debasement.
Within a year the notes stood at a fifteen per cent premium while the state's own billets d'état were discounted by 78.5 per cent — a direct comparison the author uses to show the principle was sound. He notes the cost of that very success: it persuaded the regent that paper could replace metal altogether.
“He made all his notes payable at sight, and in the coin current at the time they were issued.”
Money Mania.—The Mississippi SchemeRead in context →
Building on the bank's credit, extravagantly promised dividends pushed demand for Mississippi shares far past anything on offer.
A promised yearly dividend of 200 livres on a 500-livre share drew at least 300,000 applications for 50,000 new shares; when a further 300,000 shares were created to absorb 1,500 million livres of national debt, the author reports three times that amount would have been subscribed.
“He promised a yearly dividend of two hundred livres upon each share of five hundred, which, as the shares were paid for in billets d’état at their nominal value, but worth only 100 livres, was at the rate of about 120 per cent profit.”
Money Mania.—The Mississippi SchemeRead in context →
3 more claims
The ruinous flood of paper is charged to the regent rather than to Law.
While Law controlled the bank, issues never exceeded sixty millions; the fabrication of above 1,500 millions came after the royal takeover, when all payments were ordered in paper between February and the end of May. The author reasons that because the surge coincided with the crown taking charge, blame falls on the regent — while admitting Law's own stance is unknown, and still calling him culpably weak for helping the inundation along.
“This was the first departure from sound principles, and one for which Law is not justly blameable.”
Money Mania.—The Mississippi SchemeRead in context →
Once paper and coin had drifted apart, cutting the notes' value was unavoidable in arithmetic but impossible in politics.
The author sets 2,600 millions of notes against less than half that sum in coin, so the gap had to be closed somehow; yet when the 21 May edict halved the notes, parliament refused to register it and the outcry forced its restoration within a week. The scenes at the bank show what the lost confidence cost: a man shot on 9 July, fifteen crushed to death eight days later. A parallel attempt to prop up the Company with a maritime monopoly was abandoned too, because it would have ruined every other merchant in France.
“The parliament refused to register the edict—the greatest outcry was excited, and the state of the country became so alarming, that, as the only means of preserving tranquillity, the council of the regency was obliged to stultify its own proceedings, by publishing within seven days another edict, restoring the notes to their original value.”
Money Mania.—The Mississippi SchemeRead in context →
Taking the whole arc together, the disaster reflects a nation's greed more than one man's dishonesty.
The author holds that Law understood money better than anyone of his day, and that what he failed to foresee was that confidence, like mistrust, can swell almost without limit. He backs the point with Law's own conduct at the end: Law kept his winnings in French land, declined the money the regent offered him, and left for Brussels with a single diamond, his estates later confiscated — pawning that diamond and living by play until he died abroad in embarrassed circumstances. The author still grants that Law committed many faults.
“He understood the monetary question better than any man of his day; and if his system fell with a crash so tremendous, it was not so much his fault as that of the people amongst whom he had erected it.”
Money Mania.—The Mississippi SchemeRead in context →
How it works
The 2 mechanisms the chapter’s argument runs on.
Mechanism 1
How over-issue drains the metal behind the paper
Once payments were ordered in paper and notes were fabricated far beyond the specie held, the shrewdest operators judged prices could not keep rising and quietly swapped notes for gold and silver, shipping it abroad. Each conversion removed the metal that made the remaining notes credible, so the system hollowed out fastest at the moment it looked richest.
Mechanism 2
Why force turned into a confidence-killer
With specie draining, the government tried to compel belief: capping private coin holdings, paying informers, then halving notes by decree. Coercion signalled that the paper could not stand on its own and invited spying and persecution, so each edict subtracted from the very trust it was meant to restore, and the week-long reversal of the May decree destroyed the government's own authority.
Common misreadings
Paper money was the error itself, so the lesson is that notes are inherently a swindle.
The author's complaint is against notes issued with nothing set aside to redeem them, not against paper credit as such: while the issues stayed under sixty millions and each note was payable on demand, the paper traded above the state's own securities at a fifteen per cent premium. Ruin arrived with the unbacked fabrication of over a thousand millions after the crown took the bank over.
“He made all his notes payable at sight, and in the coin current at the time they were issued.”
Money Mania.—The Mississippi SchemeRead in context →
The system could have been saved if the government had simply held firm and enforced the May decree instead of backing down.
Cutting the notes' stated value only rearranges figures; it cannot conjure the missing metal, and coin stood at less than half the 2,600 millions of notes outstanding. Force had already proved counterproductive — the February rules capping private coin and paying informers turned servants against masters and filled the courts with confiscations — so the week-long reversal exposed a weakness that firmness could not have cured.
“The parliament refused to register the edict—the greatest outcry was excited, and the state of the country became so alarming, that, as the only means of preserving tranquillity, the council of the regency was obliged to stultify its own proceedings, by publishing within seven days another edict, restoring the notes to their original value.”
Money Mania.—The Mississippi SchemeRead in context →
Key concepts in Money Mania.—The Mississippi Scheme
- Paper credit
- Notes circulating alongside or instead of metal coin, backed by revenues or land.
- Where it applies: Works only while confidence and security behind the notes hold.
- Boatman and the waters
- Mackay's image: Law steers, but the nation's rushing confidence carries him over the falls.
- Where it applies: A figure for shared responsibility, not an excuse for every error of the scheme.
- Chamber of Justice
- A court created to punish tax farmers and loan contractors for plunder.
- Where it applies: Its fines mostly enriched courtiers rather than the state.
- Unbacked paper issue
- Printing notes with no funds set aside to redeem them.
- Where it applies: Law kept issues under sixty millions while he controlled the bank; the excess came after royal takeover.
- Credit under despotism
- Credit is fragile machinery that arbitrary government can wreck.
- Where it applies: Applies where rulers can annul decrees and dismiss opponents at will.
- Speculative frenzy
- All ranks buying stock on promises rather than on earnings.
- Where it applies: Mackay notes St. Simon and Villars as aristocratic exceptions.
8 more concepts
- Illusory prosperity
- Rising wages, prices and building that look like wealth but rest only on abundant paper money.
- Where it applies: Applies while confidence lasts; ends the moment notes cannot be exchanged for coin.
- Potemkin ice palace
- Mackay's image for a structure beautiful in cold confidence and gone at the first warm breath.
- Where it applies: A figure for credit built on belief, not a claim about Russian history.
- Edict against holding coin
- The February 1720 law capping private coin at 500 livres and paying informers half of what they found.
- Where it applies: A policy of an arbitrary government; Mackay contrasts it with constitutional remedies.
- Equalising the currency
- Closing the gap between paper notes and actual coin, either by cutting the notes' value or raising the coin's.
- Where it applies: A choice of arithmetic only; it cannot create the missing specie.
- Stultified edict
- A decree so unpopular that the government cancels it within days, destroying its own authority.
- Where it applies: Describes this chapter's May 21–27 reversal, not routine policy revision.
- Scapegoating the projector
- Blaming the system's author alone while its sponsors escape responsibility.
- Where it applies: Mackay holds the regent partly to blame, so the scapegoating is presented as unjust.
- visa
- A commission that examined state creditors' securities, destroying unproven ones and cutting interest.
- Where it applies: A retrospective audit of paper claims, not a remedy for lost wealth.
- Chambre de l’Arsenal
- A tribunal set up to try financial malversation from the bubble period.
- Where it applies: It punished officials' fraud, not the speculative delusion itself.
Reader’s notes on Money Mania.—The Mississippi SchemeAI reading companion
“not so much his fault as that of the people amongst whom he had erected it”
Read in context →Mackay's whole thesis in one clause — and notice the sleight of hand: a book about crowd delusion needs Law innocent, or the crowd isn't the villain.
“He was the boatman, and they were the waters.”
Read in context →A gorgeous image that quietly disarms itself: water can't be blamed for being water. If the French are a river, they have no agency — yet the book exists to scold them.
“a very tall, black, lean man; well shaped, above six feet high, with large pock-holes in his face”
Read in context →After pages of Beau Law, the state's own prose gives us the man as a wanted poster. The gap between the two portraits is the whole biography.
17 more notes
“His mornings were devoted to the study of finance and the principles of trade, and his evenings to the gaming-house.”
Read in context →The sentence that explains everything after it. He never stopped doing both at once — the Mississippi scheme is just the morning and the evening finally merging.
“They did not see the justice of robbing one set of rogues to fatten another.”
Read in context →The sharpest line so far, and it's about the state, not the mob. Mackay keeps catching the government in frauds he'll later charge to public madness.
“a banker deserved death if he made issues without having sufficient security”
Read in context →He says it publicly to build trust, and the line becomes the rope. Note that it's the regent who breaks it first — Mackay is laying an alibi in advance.
“paper, which could so aid a metallic currency, could entirely supersede it. Upon this fundamental error he afterwards acted.”
Read in context →Here's the actual hinge: not greed, a category mistake. A crutch mistaken for a leg.
“the whole of which might be paid in billets d’état, at their nominal value, although worth no more than a hundred and sixty livres”
Read in context →The bubble's seed in an accounting footnote — the company is capitalized in junk counted at par. Everything downstream is this discount pretending not to exist.
“he should be brought to trial, and, if found guilty, be hung at the gates of the Palais de Justice”
Read in context →Note the order of the clause — the gallows is already chosen before the guilt. Legal form wrapped around a lynching impulse.
“The parliament was ultimately overawed by the arrest of their president and two of the councillors”
Read in context →The only institution reading the scheme correctly gets jailed. Mackay reports it as weather — "the first cloud blew over" — but this is the moment the brake was removed.
“the shares were paid for in billets d’état at their nominal value, but worth only 100 livres”
Read in context →Here's the whole trick in one arithmetical aside: the dividend looks like 120% only because the state agrees to pretend its own worthless paper is worth five times what it is.
“a hunchbacked man who stood in the street gained considerable sums by lending his hump as a writing-desk”
Read in context →The most famous image in the chapter and Mackay flags it himself as "the story goes." He keeps it anyway — he wants the grotesque emblem more than the fact.
“gamblers with their roulette tables stationed themselves in the very middle of the place”
Read in context →The roulette wheels aren't an intrusion on the stock market, they're its honest twin, set up in the middle without irony.
“a man ought never to swear against his doing any one thing”
Read in context →The one humane moment so far. Not contempt for fools but two clever men discovering they are fools, and needing weeks of silence before they can say so.
“Upset us now! for God’s sake, upset us now!”
Read in context →A woman praying to be thrown from a carriage. Mackay plays it as farce, but it's the purest statement of the period's logic: injury is cheap, access is priceless.
“It falls! it falls! good God! it falls continually!”
Read in context →The joke works because for the doctor the two falling things are genuinely the same emergency. Money has colonized the vocabulary of life and death.
“promised to marry her himself on her attaining the age of twelve”
Read in context →Mackay rightly calls the aristocrats more disgusting than the enriched cooks — but note what the cooks are mocked for is bad manners, and what the marquis does is sell a child. The chapter's moral weights are oddly matched.
“Le crime fait la honte, et non pas l’échafaud:”
Read in context →The regent who annulled parliament's decrees and jailed its president becomes, for one line, the voice of equality before the law. The same arbitrary power cuts both ways.
“offering him a cup of poison, implored him to save them from disgrace”
Read in context →The family's horror is not that he murdered a man but that he'll die like a commoner. Suicide is offered as a courtesy to the bloodline.
“Law, who felt peculiarly interested in the fate of the murdered man, confirmed him in his former resolution”
Read in context →Law intervenes twice to keep the wheel turning. Not justice — the broker's safety is his system's credibility, and he knows it.
A reader’s takeAI reading companion
Law ended up ruined while the state kept profiting from the wreck
Read whole, this chapter is two books fighting inside one narrative. The first is the one Mackay announces: a tale of national frenzy, of a people who became water while Law merely steered the boat — 'not so much his fault as that of the people amongst whom he had erected it.' The second is the one his own evidence keeps writing against him: a documented account of a state that systematically defrauded its own citizens, and a crowd that was invited, coerced, and finally crushed by it. The chapter unfolds in a clean arc — the Scot with his mornings of finance and evenings of faro; the 1716 bank whose notes honestly outperformed debased coin; the Mississippi company capitalized in billets d'état counted at par though worth a fifth of that; the regent's printing presses; the delirium of the Rue Quincampoix with its roulette wheels and hunchbacked writing-desk; Conti's wagons of specie; the halving of the notes; the suspension; the fifteen crushed to death in the courtyard; the burnings, the songs, the caricatures; and Law slipping out of France nearly penniless to die obscurely in Venice while the visa and the Chambre de l'Arsenal milked the wreck for the same treasury that caused it.
What I saw through is the alibi structure. Mackay gives us Law condemning in advance any banker who issues beyond his security — then shows the regent, not Law, breaking that rule first; gives us a parliament reading the scheme correctly and reports its president's arrest as passing weather, when that arrest is precisely the moment the brake was removed; gives us the nobles' earlier paper frauds with the sharpest line in the piece — the people 'did not see the justice of robbing one set of rogues to fatten another' — and then charges the ensuing ruin to public madness. Over and over he catches the government in the fraud and bills the mob.
Continue reading
My sharpest judgement is that the real engine here was neither greed nor delusion but a category error dressed as a discovery: that paper which can aid a metallic currency can replace it — a crutch mistaken for a leg — and that this error became catastrophic only because an absolute power stood ready to enforce the pretence, jail the skeptics, outlaw the holding of coin, and make disbelief a crime. Mania needs a monopoly on force to reach that scale. Note too how the chapter's moral scales wobble: enriched cooks are mocked for their manners while a marquis who contracts to marry a child for her shares, and a family who offer poison to a murderer so the bloodline may avoid the wheel, are handled as mere colour; and Law himself intervenes twice in D'Horn's case not for justice but because his broker's safety was his system's credibility.
What I want to tell the reader is this: keep the delicious set-pieces — the woman begging to be overturned so Law might rescue her, the doctor crying 'it falls! it falls!' of a pulse and a share price at once, the confession that 'a man ought never to swear against his doing any one thing' — because they are the truest psychology in the book, the moment when clever people discover they are fools and need weeks of silence to admit it. But read the arithmetic asides, not the adjectives. The dividend of 120 per cent exists only because a sovereign agreed to pretend its own worthless paper was worth five times its price; everything downstream is that discount declining to be noticed.
And watch who pays at the end: not the regent, not D'Argenson — merely spat upon posthumously — but a nation audited by the very hands that picked its pockets. Mackay wants the crowd to be the villain because his thesis requires it. The chapter he actually wrote is about how power manufactures a mania and then sends the bill to its victims.
Read Money Mania.—The Mississippi Scheme with these cards beside each passage.
Open in FeedLitraThe South-Sea Bubble
How did Law's Mississippi scheme shape the directors' confidence?
How The South-Sea Bubble unfoldsAI-assisted
Opening: an origin that undercuts the name. The chapter begins in 1711 with the South-Sea Company's founding, and the opening move is quietly deflationary: the company is introduced as a device for converting state debt, dressed in a fantasy of Peruvian gold. The narrative lays out what Spain actually conceded — a thirty-year slave-supply contract and a single heavily taxed annual ship — and then shows even that barely functioning: the first voyage waits until 1717, the trade is suppressed the year after. So before any speculation begins, the text has established the gap it will exploit for the rest of the chapter: the company's commerce came to almost nothing, while its name and its stock moved money. From there the opening escalates into the 1720 auction against the Bank of England, which the author calls a singular spectacle — two corporations bidding for the privilege of absorbing the public debt, the Commons declaring the South-Sea proposals most advantageous on 2 February, the bill carried 172 to 55 and cleared by the Lords in four days. Walpole's warning is placed exactly here, and it is precise: if the scheme succeeded the directors would dominate the government; if it failed the nation was ruined. Cowper's Trojan-horse comparison follows. Both are brushed aside, the Lords approving 83 to 17, Walpole dismissed as a false prophet — though the author is careful to note Walpole had political motives of his own and that some peers merely echoed Commons arguments. The opening closes with the swarm of absurd "Bubbles," imitators drawn by one conspicuous success.
Development: the failure of every restraint. The middle section tests whether anything can stop the appetite, and reports that nothing can. Authority tries first: the June proclamation threatens brokers with a five-hundred-pound penalty, and the Privy Council order of 12 July abolishes scheme after scheme in long dismissive lists. Ridicule tries next — caricatures, satirical verses, even a pack of South-Sea playing-cards mocking ventures like Puckle's Machine Company. Both fail, and the chapter's sharpest analytical point sits in that failure: the schemes continued because buyers wanted them to continue. Much of the crowd was not deceived at all. Subscribers knew the ventures were empty and bought because stock-jobbing would let them resell at a premium — hence the promoter who collected 2,000*l.* in five hours for a company whose business he refused to name, then left the country. A buyer needed no belief, only a later buyer, so price could climb on resale demand alone; in the crush of Exchange Alley the same share traded ten per cent apart at the two ends of the street at the same moment. Stock reaches 1,000 per cent, and the structure stands only because nobody tests it: paper claims have swollen far past the coin that would settle them.
The turn: insiders cash out, and blame narrows. The reversal comes through September, and the chapter stages it as a test applied by the best-informed. Insiders quietly sell; confidence breaks; the price descends in steps — a thousand per cent to seven hundred, to six hundred and forty, to five hundred and forty and onward — with late buyers absorbing everything. The Bank is begged to rescue credit, and withdraws from its draft agreement. Then comes the turn that the author treats as the real subject: public fury falls wholly and exclusively on the directors. Parliament rushes to punish, seize, and investigate before anything is proved; Lord Molesworth proposes sewing the directors into sacks and drowning them in the Thames, and moderates who urge restraint are accused of complicity and threatened. Walpole — the ignored prophet of the opening — reappears to urge restoring credit first. Knight flees the country; Blunt stonewalls.
Investigation: the fraud was real, and it was upstream. The Committee of Secrecy then supplies what the rage lacked, and finds something more damaging than mismanagement: falsified books and fictitious stock used as bribes. Entries of 1,259,325*l.* stand against 574,500*l.* of stock the company did not hold, when it owned no more than 30,000*l.* in its own right. The allocations are named — 50,000*l.* to the Earl of Sunderland, 30,000*l.* to Craggs, 10,000*l.* each to the Duchess of Kendal and to Stanhope, 50,000*l.* to the Sword-blade company. The mechanism is the point: no money was paid and nothing delivered, so recipients profited only if the bill passed and prices rose. The act that created the mania was itself carried by bets on its own success.
Close: punishment by influence, credit restored, appetite surviving. The reckoning follows protection rather than guilt, and the chapter lets the asymmetry speak. Stanhope, having canvassed wavering members, is acquitted by three votes; Aislabie is expelled and imprisoned without a dissenting voice while London lights celebratory bonfires. Estates are confiscated under retroactive law, and credit is restored by redistributing the company's own profits. The final voice is Gibbon's grandson, who admits he is not disinterested and condemns the justice anyway: men condemned absent and unheard, fines fixed by hasty conversation, one man ruined for a silly boast about feeding his horses on gold. The closing judgment is that the punishment missed its target. Pinning the ruin on a handful of schemers blames a few for a collapse the public helped build and profited from while it lasted — and because the driver was the appetite rather than any particular fraud, the pattern returned in the panic of 1825 and came close to repeating in the schemes of 1836. Speculation outlived its punishment.
Key claims, with the lines that support them
The South-Sea Company grew great as a lender to the state, not as a trading house.
The author shows its actual commerce came to almost nothing: Spain never meant to open its American ports, the single permitted annual ship did not sail until 1717, and the trade was shut down the following year. What moved money was the company's name and its stock, which jumped from 130 to 300, approached 400, and absorbed a million and a half in subscriptions at 400 per cent within hours.
“The name of the South-Sea Company was thus continually before the public.”
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Parliament let two corporations bid against each other for the right to take over the public debt, and the South-Sea side won.
The Bank refused to be outbid in what the author calls a singular auction; on 2 February the Commons declared the South-Sea proposals the most advantageous, the bill passed the Commons 172 to 55, and the Lords cleared it in four days. Treating national debt relief as a prize to be bid for is what gave the company the standing from which the mania grew.
“The bank resolved not to be outbidden in this singular auction, and the governors also reconsidered their first proposal, and sent in a new one.”
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Correct warnings were given and simply brushed aside because nobody wanted to hear them.
Against the rush of the auction, Walpole forecast exactly the two outcomes that mattered — if the scheme worked the directors would dominate the government, if it failed the nation would be ruined — and Earl Cowper compared the bill to the Trojan horse, yet the Lords still approved it 83 to 17 and Walpole was dismissed as a false prophet. The author notes Walpole also had political reasons to oppose the bill, and that some peers were merely repeating Commons arguments.
“All his eloquence was in vain. He was looked upon as a false prophet, or compared to the hoarse raven, croaking omens of evil.”
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3 more claims
Bans and public mockery could not stop the speculation, because sellers and buyers alike wanted it to go on.
The June proclamation threatened brokers with a five-hundred-pound penalty and the Privy Council order of 12 July abolished scheme after scheme, yet new projects kept appearing and the public kept encouraging them. Ridicule failed in the same way: caricatures, satirical verses and even a pack of South-Sea playing-cards lampooned ventures such as Puckle's Machine Company, and fresh bubbles still sprang up daily.
“On the 12th of July, an order of the Lords Justices assembled in privy council was published, dismissing all the petitions that had been presented for patents and charters, and dissolving all the bubble companies.”
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The act itself was carried with the help of bribes disguised as stock the company did not even own.
The Committee of Secrecy found entries of 1,259,325l. against 574,500l. of stock the company did not hold, when it owned no more than 30,000l. in its own right, and traced named allocations — 50,000l. to the Earl of Sunderland, 30,000l. to Craggs, 10,000l. each to the Duchess of Kendal and Stanhope, 50,000l. to the Sword-blade company. Since no money was paid and nothing was delivered, the recipients gained only if the bill passed and prices rose.
“This fictitious stock, which had been chiefly at the disposal of Sir John Blunt, Mr. Gibbon, and Mr. Knight, was distributed among several members of the government and their connexions, by way of bribe, to facilitate the passing of the bill.”
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The reckoning afterwards followed public rage and political protection rather than any consistent measure of guilt.
Before anything was proved, punishment was the only subject discussed: Lord Molesworth proposed sewing the directors into sacks and drowning them in the Thames, and moderates were themselves accused of complicity and threatened. The outcomes then diverged by influence — Stanhope was acquitted by three votes after canvassing wavering members, while Aislabie was expelled and imprisoned without a dissenting voice and London lit celebratory bonfires. Gibbon's grandson, admitting he is not disinterested, adds that men were condemned absent and unheard in fines fixed by hasty conversation, one ruined for a silly boast about feeding his horses on gold.
“Before the guilt of the South-Sea directors was known, punishment was the only cry.”
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How it works
The 3 mechanisms the chapter’s argument runs on.
Mechanism 1
Inflating stock for resale
Promoters talked prices up with rumours and dividends no real fund could pay. Buyers did not have to believe any of it: they only needed someone later willing to pay more, so the price could keep rising on resale demand alone. In the crush of Exchange Alley the same share even traded ten per cent apart at the two ends of the street at the same moment.
Mechanism 2
Paper credit outrunning cash
Paper claims had swollen far past the coin available to settle them, so the structure stood only while nobody tested it. When the best-informed men quietly cashed out, confidence broke and the price fell in steps from a thousand per cent to seven hundred, six hundred and forty, five hundred and forty and on down, with late buyers absorbing the loss.
Mechanism 3
Why manias repeat
In a trading nation one conspicuous success invites imitators, and swindlers set up wherever greed is already looking for a quick return. Because the appetite, not the particular fraud, is the driver, the same pattern returned in the panic of 1825 and almost repeated itself in the schemes of 1836.
Common misreadings
The company's shares soared because it had won rich trading access to Spanish America, so the price at least started from something real.
The concession Spain actually granted was narrow — supplying slaves for thirty years plus one heavily taxed annual ship — and even that barely operated: the first voyage waited until 1717 and the trade was suppressed the year after. The company's strength lay in financing government debt and in talking its own stock upward, which is why the price could multiply while the trade produced almost nothing.
“The name of the South-Sea Company was thus continually before the public.”
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The disaster was essentially a fraud worked on a trusting public, so the real cause was the directors and punishing them addressed it.
The author shows much of the crowd was not deceived at all: subscribers knew the ventures were empty and bought only because stock-jobbing would let them sell at a premium — one promoter collected 2,000l. in five hours for a company whose business he refused to disclose, then left the country. Prohibitions failed precisely because buyers wanted the schemes to continue, so pinning the whole ruin on a handful of schemers blames a few for a collapse the public itself helped build and profited from while it lasted.
“it was enough for their purpose that their shares would, by stock-jobbing arts, be soon raised to a premium, when they got rid of them with all expedition to the really credulous.”
The South-Sea BubbleRead in context →
Key concepts in The South-Sea Bubble
- The assiento contract
- The only real concession Spain granted: supplying slaves for thirty years plus one limited annual ship, heavily taxed.
- Where it applies: It was a narrow trading privilege, not the free access to Spanish-American ports that the public imagined.
- Bubbles
- The popular nickname for the hundreds of short-lived joint-stock schemes floated only to be sold at a premium.
- Where it applies: Applies to schemes created for share-price gain, not to ventures that were merely badly timed.
- Artificial raising of stock
- Deliberately inflating share value by spreading rumours and promising dividends no fund could pay.
- Where it applies: Describes promoters' technique; it does not require that buyers believe the rumours.
- Bubble company
- A joint-stock scheme floated on promised charters and vague ventures rather than real business.
- Where it applies: Applies to the imitation projects abolished by order, not to the chartered South-Sea company itself.
- Overstretched paper credit
- Paper claims grown so far past available coin that any doubt collapses the whole structure.
- Where it applies: Describes the systemic limit, not the moral guilt of particular directors.
- Scapegoating of directors
- Blaming a small group of schemers for a ruin the whole public helped create.
- Where it applies: Applies where the crowd itself profited from the mania before it broke.
5 more concepts
- Restoring credit before punishment
- Walpole's priority: put out the financial fire first, hunt the arsonist later.
- Where it applies: A policy stance in panic, not a denial of guilt.
- Moral corruption by sudden wealth
- Fast gambling gains loosened manners, bred luxury and insolence.
- Where it applies: Describes the mania's social effects, not its financial mechanics.
- Fictitious stock
- Stock entered in the books that the company did not own, handed to officials so they profited only if the bill passed and prices rose.
- Where it applies: It was a bribe mechanism, not a real sale: no money, deposit, or delivery date existed.
- Bill of pains and penalties
- A retroactive statute punishing acts that were not crimes when committed.
- Where it applies: Gibbon's objection is to procedure, not to whether the directors were guilty.
- Popular imitativeness
- In a trading nation, one project's success breeds copies, pulling the greedy crowd into ruin again.
- Where it applies: Explains recurrence (1825, 1836), not the specific fraud of 1720.
Reader’s notes on The South-Sea BubbleAI reading companion
“the scheme was always called by his flatterers “the Earl of Oxford’s masterpiece.”
Read in context →The flatterers do the naming — and the name survives as evidence against him. Mackay lets the praise convict.
“it was only necessary to send the manufactures of England to the coast to be repaid a hundred fold in gold and silver ingots by the natives”
Read in context →The fantasy isn't just greed, it's a colonial arithmetic: trinkets out, bullion back. Note how the mania needs a vague faraway place to live in.
“the privilege of supplying the colonies with negroes for thirty years”
Read in context →Dropped in as a mere disappointment — the one real asset was the slave trade, and the chapter walks past it in a clause. Worth noticing what a moralist about money doesn't moralize about.
17 more notes
“stretch the cord of credit to its extremest tension, without causing it to snap asunder”
Read in context →The purest statement of the bubble mind: not ignorance of Law's failure but confidence in outrunning it. Everyone thinks they're the exception.
“The bank resolved not to be outbidden in this singular auction”
Read in context →The crucial structural point, understated: the state auctioned its own debt and let two rivals bid each other into fantasy. The mania had an official starting gun.
“the benches became deserted when it was known that he would speak on the South-Sea question”
Read in context →Sharper than any booing. Not refutation — absence. Manias defend themselves by making the dissenter boring.
“Contrary to all expectation, South-Sea stock fell when the bill received the royal assent.”
Read in context →The one honest moment — the thing was worth more as a promise than as law. Fulfillment is the bubble's enemy.
“A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”
Read in context →The joke is that it's not a swindle so much as a mirror: the subscribers were already buying nothing, and this man simply labelled the product honestly.
“He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture”
Read in context →Mackay can't resist admiring him. In a chapter of fools, the only figure with proportion is the thief who knew when to stop.
“it was enough for their purpose that their shares would, by stock-jobbing arts, be soon raised to a premium”
Read in context →This quietly dismantles the whole "madness of crowds" thesis — they weren't deluded, they were counting on someone else's delusion. Belief wasn't required, only a buyer.
“shares in the same bubble were known to have been sold at the same instant ten per cent higher at one end of the alley than at the other”
Read in context →A price that can't agree with itself across fifty yards isn't a price at all. Best single image of value coming unmoored.
“for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”
Read in context →The whole mania compressed into one line. The author doesn't need to comment — he just lets it sit in the list and the list does the satire for him.
“for a wheel for perpetual motion—capital one million;”
Read in context →Note the pairing: impossible physics, precise capitalization. Money was perfectly willing to be specific about a thing that could not exist.
“They’re only wounded who have shares therein.”
Read in context →The sharpest critic of the bubble was a playing card. Satire found the loss mechanism before the market did.
“they had not forgotten themselves. There was some hissing”
Read in context →The hiss is the best detail in the chapter — the crowd can still hear a confession even when wrapped in praise. Hungerford boasts his way into evidence.
“whenever he had eaten a good dinner, folded his hands upon his paunch, and expressed his doubts whether there could be a hungry man in the world”
Read in context →A whole theory of winners' epistemology in one fat alderman. Mackay reaches for a joke because the Duke's complacency isn't argument, it's digestion.
“securing themselves by the losses of the deluded, thoughtless numbers”
Read in context →Broderick's letter names the real transfer: not value destroyed but value moved, from the late to the early. The insiders' exit is the crash.
“ten millions (which is more than our running cash) could not circulate two hundred millions”
Read in context →Here a contemporary gets it exactly right, by arithmetic, from the start. Which quietly undercuts any claim that nobody could have known.
“running the risk of being swept away with those they intended to save”
Read in context →The rescuer as potential casualty — the eternal shape of every bailout since. And the Bank escapes on a technicality: blanks where the penalty should be.
“Is there no warmth in the despair of a plundered people?”
Read in context →Mackay drops the chronicler's voice and picks a fight with Smollett. The whole project of the book declares itself here: crowd folly is history, not an interlude in it.
A reader’s takeAI reading companion
When the mania's answer to Walpole was boredom, the benches slowly emptied
Read whole, Mackay's South-Sea chapter is less a story about madness than a story about machinery, and its structure gives the game away. It opens not with a crowd but with a government: a debt the state could not service, a company invented to absorb it, and a fantasy of Peruvian bullion stapled on as collateral. That origin matters because everything after it follows from an official act — the 1720 auction in which the Treasury let the South-Sea Company and the Bank of England bid against each other for the privilege of taking on the national debt. The mania had a starting gun, and it was fired by the state. Walpole's warnings were not shouted down but emptied out; the benches simply deserted when he rose. A mania's first defence is not refutation, it is boredom.
The chapter's middle is its most quietly devastating stretch, and not for the reasons it advertises. The famous catalogue of bubbles — perpetual motion at a precise capitalisation of one million, and above all the undertaking of great advantage but nobody to know what it is — reads as proof of credulity, and Mackay lets the list do the satire unaided. But the texts he quotes keep telling a different story. Subscribers to the absurd schemes did not need to believe in them; they needed only to expect a buyer at a premium, and the promoters said so plainly. That is not delusion, it is a calculated bet on someone else's delusion, and it strains the book's own title. The anonymous promoter who took his two thousand pounds and vanished is the one figure in the chapter with a sense of proportion, and Mackay cannot quite hide his admiration. Likewise the detail of the same share trading ten per cent apart at the two ends of Exchange Alley: a price that cannot agree with itself across fifty yards has stopped being a price. And it is worth noticing that the sharpest contemporary dissent came not from statesmen but from satirists and a deck of playing cards, and that one correspondent demolished the whole thing by arithmetic — ten millions of cash cannot circulate two hundred millions — before the collapse. Nobody could have known is simply false.
Continue reading
The turn comes with the bill's royal assent, when the stock fell: the scheme was worth more as a promise than as a fact. Fulfilment is the bubble's enemy. What follows is the part the chapter narrates most honestly and judges least clearly. Broderick's letter names the mechanism — the insiders secured themselves by the losses of the deluded — which is to say value was not destroyed so much as transferred, from the late to the early. The crash is not a separate catastrophe that befalls everyone; the insiders' exit is the crash. Then the rescue phase, already in its modern shape: the Bank approached, hesitating, aware it might be swept away with those it meant to save, and escaping on the technicality of blanks left where penalties should have been.
The close is the most uncomfortable and the most instructive. Parliament, having legislated the scheme into being, discovered fictitious stock and bribed ministers, and then punished retroactively — confiscating estates by special act, acquitting Stanhope, convicting Aislabie, redistributing the company's profits to restore credit. Gibbon's grandson, writing as an heir of the dispossessed, objects that this was justice invented after the fact. He is right about the law and beside the point about the politics: a legislature implicated in the fraud needed directors to punish, and found them. Walpole's instinct — restore credit first, punish later — is what actually ended the crisis, and it is also what let the state off.
What I'd tell a reader: read this chapter against its own thesis. Mackay sells the crowd, but his evidence indicts the architecture — a state monetising its debt through a private monopoly, insiders with asymmetric information and an exit, and a political class that could not investigate itself without self-harm. The crowd was the raw material, not the cause. And notice one silence: the Company's single genuine asset, the thirty-year contract to supply enslaved Africans to the Spanish colonies, passes by in a clause, mentioned only as a commercial disappointment. A moralist spends twenty pages on the folly of losing money and not one sentence on what the money was for. Mackay's best moment is when he breaks the chronicler's pose to round on Smollett — is there no warmth in the despair of a plundered people? — because it declares the whole project: crowd folly is history, not an interlude in it. That claim is true, and it applies to the part of the history he declined to warm to.
Read The South-Sea Bubble with these cards beside each passage.
Open in FeedLitraThe Tulipomania
How did stock-jobbing techniques move from tulips to later bubbles Mackay describes?
How The Tulipomania unfoldsAI-assisted
Mackay's chapter on tulipomania unfolds as a small natural history that slides into a moral and economic one, and its organization mirrors that slide: it begins with botany, passes through anecdote, climbs to frenzy, breaks at the panic, and settles into a wry survey of what the flower is worth now.
The opening: provenance and the puzzle of value. The chapter starts in the dry register of horticultural record-keeping. The tulip's name is traced to a Turkish word for turban; Conrad Gesner reports seeing it at Augsburg in 1559 in Counsellor Herwart's garden, grown from bulbs sent from Constantinople; the first English roots arrive from Vienna in 1600. Mackay then charts the social ascent of the flower — from wealthy Amsterdam collectors ordering direct from Constantinople, to learned admirers like Lipsius, to the middle classes, until by 1634 it was "a proof of bad taste in any man of fortune" to own none, and a Haarlem trader paid half his fortune for one root purely to display it. Having established the fact, Mackay immediately poses the question that governs this chapter: why should so prudent a people pay so much for a flower with neither the beauty nor the perfume of a rose? He stages a miniature debate on this — Cowley's verse praising the tulip's gaudy variability, which Mackay dismisses as "not very poetical," against Beckmann's prose, which he prefers for its fidelity. Beckmann supplies the crucial irony: the tulip's prized variegation is a product of "accident, weakness, or disease," so that the more beautiful it becomes, the weaker it grows. Mackay's own gloss — that people grow attached to what gives them trouble, as a mother favors her ailing child — is the chapter's first explanatory move: the value was never in the object.
Development: prices, weights, and comic anecdote. From 1634 Mackay turns quantitative, and the numbers do the rhetorical work. Ordinary industry is neglected; 100,000 florins buys forty roots; bulbs must be sold by weight in perits, a unit smaller than a grain. He itemizes the tariff — Admiral Liefken, Admiral Van der Eyck, Childer, Viceroy, and above all the Semper Augustus at 5,500 florins for 200 perits — and notes that in early 1636 only two inferior Semper Augustus roots existed in Holland, one of which fetched 4,600 florins plus a carriage, two grey horses, and harness, while twelve acres of building ground were offered for the other. (He cites a thousand-page folio by "Munting" and promises a list of goods bartered for one Viceroy; the list itself is missing from the text as given here.) He then pauses the ledger for two comic set-pieces, both turning on outsiders who cannot see value where the market has placed it: the sailor who pockets a Semper Augustus as a relish for his red herring and eats a breakfast that "might have sumptuously feasted the Prince of Orange" — compared, mock-heroically, to Cleopatra's pearl and Gresham's diamond — and the English amateur botanist who dissects an Admiral Van der Eyck with his penknife while making "learned remarks." Both end in prison, which is the point: the anecdotes are funny, but they measure how far collective valuation had drifted from any sense a stranger could share.
The peak: speculation detaches from flowers. Mackay then marks the decisive change. In 1636 regular marts opened on the Amsterdam exchange and in Rotterdam, Haarlem, Leyden, Alkmaar, Hoorn and elsewhere, and "symptoms of gambling now became, for the first time, apparent." Stock-jobbers moved in and manipulated fluctuations; confidence peaked and "every body gained"; people rushed to the marts "like flies around a honey-pot." His catalogue of participants — nobles, farmers, mechanics, seamen, footmen, maid-servants, chimney-sweeps, old clothes-women — insists the delusion was universal rather than elite, and his catalogue of consequences shows the real economy inverting itself: property converted to cash and cash to flowers, houses and lands sold at ruinous prices, foreign money pouring in, the cost of necessities and luxuries rising together until Holland seemed "the very antechamber of Plutus." The institutional detail is his sharpest touch — a code of laws drawn up for the trade, dedicated clerks, and the title of "tulip-notary" displacing that of public notary; in small towns the chief tavern served as show-place, with two or three hundred diners and vases of blooms along the tables.
The turn and the aftermath. The reversal arrives with a single recognition: the prudent saw that rich men no longer bought flowers for their gardens but to resell at "cent per cent profit," and therefore that "somebody must lose fearfully in the end." As that conviction spread, "prices fell, and never rose again." Mackay dramatizes default with an algebraic instance — A contracts for ten Semper Augustines from B at 4,000 florins each on six weeks' credit; B delivers, the price has fallen to three or four hundred, A refuses both the tulips and the difference. Defaulters are announced daily; holders cannot sell at a quarter of cost; the enriched few hide their gains in English funds; risen men sink back into obscurity and merchants into beggary. The remainder traces the failure of every remedy in sequence: public meetings, deputies to Amsterdam, a government that declines to act and tells the holders to settle it themselves, then the Amsterdam compromise voiding contracts made before November 1636 and releasing later purchasers for ten per cent — a settlement that satisfied nobody, since bulbs once worth 6,000 florins now fetched 500, making the ten per cent composition a hundred florins more than the thing itself. Referred to the Provincial Council at the Hague, the question produced three months of deliberation and no decision, only advice identical to the already-useless plan of the deputies. The legal ground is the chapter's hard conclusion: no court would enforce payment, because "debts contracted in gambling were no debts in law." So the matter simply rested — losses lay where they fell, profits were kept, and Dutch commerce took a shock it took years to shake off.
The close: the long tail. Mackay ends by widening out in space and then in time. London's Exchange sold tulips publicly in 1636 and Parisian jobbers tried to manufacture a mania of their own; both succeeded only partially, though the example permanently raised the flower's standing, and the Dutch remain its most devoted and highest-paying admirers — the wealthy Dutchman vaunting his tulips as an Englishman does his racehorses or old pictures. The final paragraph is a price series stretching to Mackay's own day: in England a tulip yields more money than an oak, and a truly black one would be worth a dozen acres of standing corn; ten guineas was the Scottish maximum late in the seventeenth century; by 1769 the Don Quevedo and the Valentinier fetched two and two and a half guineas; fifteen guineas was common in 1800; a Miss Fanny Kemble bulb sold at auction in London for seventy-five pounds in 1835; and a Chelsea gardener catalogued one at two hundred guineas. The effect is to deny the reader any comfortable distance — the madness was extreme and its machinery collapsed, but the appetite that drove it is still quietly priced in the catalogues of the present.
Key claims, with the lines that support them
What made the tulip so costly was fashion and the wish to outdo one's neighbours, not any real merit of the flower.
The author points out it has neither the rose's beauty nor its scent, and lasts no longer; the one lyrical praise he quotes is a poet's, while Beckmann's sober account traces the prized variegation to weakness and disease. The craze's logic is social: a man of fortune without tulips was thought to show bad taste, and a Harlaem trader gave half his fortune for a single root purely so acquaintances could admire it in his conservatory.
“One would suppose that there must have been some great virtue in this flower to have made it so valuable in the eyes of so prudent a people as the Dutch; but it has neither the beauty nor the perfume of the rose—hardly the beauty of the “sweet, sweet-pea;” neither is it as enduring as either.”
The TulipomaniaRead in context →
Because the fashion was about standing rather than the flower, it travelled down the social ladder until ordinary work was neglected.
From learned men and rich Amsterdammers the rage reached merchants and shopkeepers, then nobles, farmers, seamen, servants, chimney-sweeps and old clothes-women alike. Prices followed: bulbs were weighed in perits, a Semper Augustus of 200 perits was reckoned cheap at 5,500 florins, and 100,000 florins bought only forty roots, while houses and land were dumped at ruinous prices to raise cash. The author takes these figures from earlier compilers such as Hunting rather than from records of his own.
“Nobles, citizens, farmers, mechanics, sea-men, footmen, maid-servants, even chimney-sweeps and old clothes-women, dabbled in tulips.”
The TulipomaniaRead in context →
Outright gambling entered only in 1636, when regular marts turned bulbs into a traded stock.
The author dates the first symptoms of gambling to the opening of marts on the Amsterdam exchange and in Rotterdam, Harlaem, Leyden and other towns, where jobbers deliberately worked prices up and down and profited on the swings. The trade's new scaffolding shows how far it had gone: a written code for dealers, clerks and "tulip-notaries" so numerous the ordinary title of public notary fell out of use, and tavern "show-places" where hundreds dined among vases of blooms.
“Symptoms of gambling now became, for the first time, apparent.”
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2 more claims
The turn came not from any outside shock but from the prudent few reasoning that somebody must lose heavily at the end.
Once rich men were buying only to resell at double, it became plain the chain had to break; as that conviction spread prices fell and never rose again. The author's illustration: A had contracted for ten Semper Augustines at 4,000 florins each six weeks forward, B delivered on time, but the price was down to three or four hundred and A refused both the bulbs and the shortfall — defaults of that kind were announced daily across Holland.
“It was seen that somebody must lose fearfully in the end.”
The TulipomaniaRead in context →
Neither the dealers themselves nor any level of Dutch authority could undo the damage.
Deputies at Amsterdam voided all contracts made before November 1636 and let later buyers off for ten per cent, but since bulbs once worth 6,000 florins now fetched 500, that ten per cent was about a hundred florins more than the thing was worth, and nobody was satisfied. The Provincial Council at the Hague deliberated three months, said it needed more information, and re-proposed the very scheme already shown useless; the Amsterdam judges refused to hear the cases at all. So losses stayed where they fell, winners kept their gains, and Dutch commerce took years to recover.
“Thus the matter rested. To find a remedy was beyond the power of the government.”
The TulipomaniaRead in context →
How it works
The 3 mechanisms the chapter’s argument runs on.
Mechanism 1
Cultivation makes the flower frail yet fashionable
The author, following Beckmann, notes the streaks and soft colours collectors paid for are products of accident, weakness or disease; the more cultivated and admired a tulip becomes, the harder it is to transplant or even keep alive. The trouble it costs breeds attachment, much as a parent dotes on a sickly child, so the praise heaped on it outruns the flower itself.
Mechanism 2
Resale buying detaches price from the thing
Once organised marts opened in 1636, buyers stopped acquiring bulbs to own them and bought only to resell at a profit. Jobbers then worked the swings, buying on dips and selling on rises, and the visible early winnings pulled in fresh crowds, so the quoted price came to reflect expected resale rather than any use or beauty.
Mechanism 3
Why the bust left losses unrepaired
When it sank in that someone had to be the final loser, confidence went and prices never recovered, so forward buyers simply refused delivery. Because Dutch judges treated these as gambling bargains and gambling debts as no debts at law, no suit could force payment, and every loss stayed wherever the reaction had placed it.
Common misreadings
Such prices must mean the tulip really was an extraordinarily beautiful or valuable plant by nature.
On the author's account the flower's intrinsic claims are modest — less beautiful and less fragrant than a rose, no more lasting — and the very markings collectors prized arise from accident, weakness or disease, leaving the plant barely able to survive transplanting. The price came from reputation and rivalry among owners, which is why a buyer would spend half a fortune on a root he never meant to sell.
“One would suppose that there must have been some great virtue in this flower to have made it so valuable in the eyes of so prudent a people as the Dutch; but it has neither the beauty nor the perfume of the rose—hardly the beauty of the “sweet, sweet-pea;” neither is it as enduring as either.”
The TulipomaniaRead in context →
Since the Amsterdam settlement annulled the contracts and the courts would not enforce them, most people escaped the losses and the episode blew over cheaply.
Refusing enforcement only froze the damage in place: whoever happened to be holding stock when the reaction hit bore the ruin, those who had taken profits quietly kept them and moved the money into English and other funds, substantial merchants were reduced near beggary, and the author says the country's commerce suffered a shock it took many years to shake off.
“Thus the matter rested. To find a remedy was beyond the power of the government.”
The TulipomaniaRead in context →
Key concepts in The Tulipomania
- Tulipomania
- The Dutch craze of 1634-1637 in which tulip bulbs were traded at ruinous prices by every social class.
- Where it applies: Mackay notes imitation in London and Paris only partially succeeded, so the full mania is specific to Holland.
- Fictitious value
- A price sustained by expectation of resale rather than by any use or beauty of the thing itself.
- Where it applies: Applies once buyers hold for resale profit, not while a trader buys a bulb to keep for admiration.
- Gambling debts are no debts in law
- The Dutch courts' ground for refusing to enforce tulip contracts, leaving losses where they fell.
- Where it applies: It blocked enforcement but offered no restitution; vendors holding stock simply bore the loss.
- Tulip-notary
- Clerks and notaries serving only the tulip trade, so common the title displaced the ordinary public notary.
- Where it applies: A marker of institutional capture in the boom's peak, not a lasting Dutch office.
0 more concepts
Reader’s notes on The TulipomaniaAI reading companion
“says that he first saw it in the year 1559, in a garden at Augsburg”
Read in context →Note how the chapter opens in the register of botanical scholarship — dates, names, provenance. Mackay earns credibility as a naturalist before he starts prosecuting a people.
“it has neither the beauty nor the perfume of the rose”
Read in context →Here's the hidden premise of the whole chapter: that a thing's price ought to track some intrinsic virtue. Nobody pays for the smell. They pay because someone else will pay more.
“the more beautiful it turns, grows so much the weaker”
Read in context →Beckmann's horticulture is accidentally the best economics in the chapter — the prized variegation was a virus. Value resting literally on disease.
11 more notes
“as a mother often loves her sick and ever-ailing child better”
Read in context →A tender simile smuggled in to do contemptuous work. He explains away the Dutch as sentimental invalid-nursers, which lets him skip asking whether the trade had a structure.
“a Childer of 106 perits was worth 1615 florins”
Read in context →Weighed like gold, in units smaller than a grain. The absurdity isn't the price — it's the precision. Bureaucratic exactitude is how a delusion persuades itself it's a market.
“he slily seized an opportunity and slipped it into his pocket”
Read in context →The sailor is the chapter's only sane economist: he priced the bulb by what it could do for him. One bite collapses the whole social fiction.
“he remained in prison for some months on a charge of felony”
Read in context →The punchline turns cold. A man jailed for eating an onion — the mania had real coercive teeth, and Mackay tells it as comedy. Also: both anecdotes come from travellers' tales, repeated with no scepticism by a man who doubts everything else here.
“are these admirals common in your country?”
Read in context →Delicious — the Englishman's politeness is the perfect solvent for Dutch hysteria. Note the convenient shape: in both stories the fool is a foreigner and the Dutchman is the lunatic.
“Symptoms of gambling now became, for the first time, apparent.”
Read in context →The real turn of the chapter, and he almost hurries past it. Not flower-love but futures contracts — selling bulbs that were still in the ground. The delusion is a derivatives market, not a taste in gardening.
“even chimney-sweeps and old clothes-women, dabbled in tulips”
Read in context →The catalogue of low trades is Mackay's signature move — a bubble becomes scandalous precisely when the wrong classes join. Modern historians think the trade stayed fairly narrow; the mob is partly rhetorical.
“that of tulip-notary usurping its place”
Read in context →This detail is worth more than all the prices. A whole professional infrastructure grew to service the fantasy — which is what makes bubbles feel so solid from the inside.
“prices fell, and never rose again”
Read in context →Five words doing the work of an explanation. He never says what pricked it — the crash arrives as weather, because for his thesis the only cause needed is that crowds are mad.
“debts contracted in gambling were no debts in law”
Read in context →Here is the actual resolution: the courts voided the contracts, so most paper losses were never paid. Which quietly undercuts the ruin he's just described — far fewer were destroyed than the prose implies.
“a tulip will produce more money than an oak”
Read in context →And the final pages show English collectors paying 200 guineas with no mania at all. His own evidence proves flowers can simply be expensive — the madness was never in the price.
A reader’s takeAI reading companion
Most fabulous losses were gambling debts the courts refused to enforce
Mackay writes this as a morality tale and a great one — the prose is brisk, the anecdotes immortal, and the sailor with his herring has outlived every actual price in the record. But reading closely, the chapter keeps handing you the tools to dismantle it. His argument needs a nation gone collectively insane over a flower, so he opens by proving the tulip isn't worth loving (as if price should follow perfume), fills the middle with a mob of chimney-sweeps and maidservants, and lets the crash arrive uncaused, because 'crowds are mad' is the explanation he brought with him. Yet three things leak through.
First, he admits the trade had become futures contracts, notaries, and a legal code — not gardening but finance, with institutions solid enough to feel permanent from inside. Second, he reports that the courts refused to enforce gambling debts, which means most of the fabulous losses were paper that never came due; the ruin is narrated richly and then quietly voided. Third, his closing pages show Englishmen calmly paying 200 guineas for a bulb — so a high price for a flower is not, by itself, a delusion. What he actually documents, against his own thesis, is a speculative market in a thinly supplied asset, settled mostly by walking away.
Continue reading
The madness of crowds may be real, but Mackay proves it the way a good lawyer proves anything: by choosing which evidence to raise his voice over, and which to mention once and move past.
Read The Tulipomania with these cards beside each passage.
Open in FeedLitraThe Alchymists; or Searchers for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Water of Life
How does the 'metals are diseased gold' theory shape later European experiments?
How The Alchymists; or Searchers for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Water of Life unfoldsAI-assisted
The opening: a theory of desire before a single name is mentioned. Mackay does not begin with alchemy at all; he begins with discontent. His premise is that dissatisfaction with one's lot is precisely what raises human beings above animals and drives every improvement — but that the same restlessness, when it collides with limits that cannot be moved, curdles into delusion. From this single root he derives three branches at once: fear of death yields the elixir of life, want yields the gold-making stone, and ignorance of the future yields astrology and divination. He then sorts the deceivers into three overlapping classes, pauses to defend the study of past error as worthwhile rather than idle, and only then begins the historical thread with legendary origins, Geber, Alfarabi, and Avicenna. The effect of this ordering matters: by the time any adept appears, the reader has already been handed the explanation for him.
First development: the medieval gallery, and the discovery that reputation inflates itself. The chapter now becomes a procession — Albertus Magnus and Aquinas, Artephius in his claimed 1025th year, Alain de Lisle, Arnold de Villeneuve with his longevity recipe, Pietro d'Apone destroyed by the Inquisition, Raymond Lulli, Roger Bacon. Read in sequence, these portraits do a specific piece of work. Popular opinion takes boasts that were already extravagant and swells them into outright magic — a brazen statue that spoke until Aquinas smashed it, a Cologne winter turned to summer, seven spirits kept in crystal vases, gold that flew home to its owner — and the adepts profit by letting the legends stand. Bacon arrives as the sharpest turn of the screw: the most learned man of his age, a genuine discoverer of the properties of lenses, who nonetheless spent much of his life hunting the stone. The delusion, Mackay insists here, was not a disease of fools.
Second development: money, patronage, and the state's incoherence. The survey then shifts from marvels to accounts. Alchemists point to the eighteen million florins Pope John XXII left in 1344 and ask where else it could have come from; Mackay refuses the inference and goes looking for worldly sources — Naudé's explanation of Lulli's six millions as the yield of a wool tax he had advised, and Flamel's gold more plausibly earned by usury and debt-collecting than by transmuting mercury, given a miser who lived on porridge in a mean apartment. Governments fare no better than believers: parliament makes gold-making a felony in 1404, and Henry VI afterwards issues four patents to knights, chemists and priests to find the stone so the crown can settle its debts in real metal. No gold ever appears. Alongside this runs the chapter's steadiest refrain, that the pursuit ruined everyone it touched — Bernard of Trèves searching from fourteen to eighty-five, burning eight hundred crowns on Rhazes and two thousand on Geber for fire and smoke, and ending a beggar.
The turn into darkness: Gilles de Rays. The Marshal de Rays is placed where the chapter's tone breaks. Broke after extravagance, he hires alchemists; when they fail he turns to devil-raising with Prelati and a Poitou physician, who milk him with staged apparitions until Church inquiry brings trial for sorcery, sodomy and murder, and execution. This episode also supplies the chapter's clearest statement of its central mechanism: operations performed out of the patron's sight, long waiting intervals prescribed, so that nothing can ever be checked when it is claimed. Failure is never falsification — it is blamed on the patron's doubts or on an interval improperly observed. Digging under the oak produces only inscribed slates, and Prelati simply produces a fresh excuse and a planned pilgrimage.
Third development: mysticism, then the oracle problem. Mackay closes the medieval list (Ortholani, Isaac of Holland, Koffstky, Charles VI) and marks a deliberate shift: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries alchemy swells into a mystical system promising health, communion with God, and visible spirits, spreading from Rosencreutz. Case studies accumulate — Augurello mocked with an empty purse by Leo X; Agrippa, honoured by emperors and praised by Melancthon and Erasmus, dead destitute at forty-eight; Paracelsus, self-styled monarch of medicine, dead in a charity hospital; Agricola; Zachaire's autobiography of mortgaged estates, which Mackay reads as a cover story for ruin. Then comes Dee and Kelly, the chapter's analytical centre. The crystal has no power of its own: Dee's young son sees a vague shadow, the level-headed Bartholomew nothing at all. Because Kelly alone reports what the spirits say, he can study Dee's weaknesses and have the spirits command whatever suits him — ending in the order to share wives, which destroys the partnership. Importantly, Mackay keeps the two men distinct: Dee is a sincere enthusiast who laboured among furnaces until the fumes nearly poisoned him and sank into poverty, not a liar. Seton, racked to a skeleton at Dresden, and Sendivogius, stripped and tied to a pillar, show that advertised success was more dangerous than failure; Heydon's Rosicrucian claim that air holds a "fine foreign fatness" and that meat applied as a plaster will nourish a man for centuries marks the outer limit of the absurd.
The close: exposure, then a measured concession. The last movement is a catalogue of fraud mechanics and frauds. Borri ends in an Inquisition prison; Helvetius claims a transmutation; Kircher attacks; Geoffroy's 1722 paper exposes the double-bottomed crucible, and Mackay runs through the rest — doctored lead, half-gold nails, washed coins — adding that the adepts' showy disinterestedness was itself a lure for patronage. The eighteenth century then supplies his best study in how testimony defeats judgement: Delisle, the Provençal blacksmith whose public transmutations convert the Prior of Châteauneuf and at last the Bishop of Senés, whose long report to Desmarets records eyewitness conviction overriding years of distrust, even as Delisle keeps evading the royal summons until he dies in the Bastille after gendarmes shoot him. His stepson Aluys inherits the patter and vanishes; St. Germain charms Louis XV's court with an elixir and unexplained diamonds; Cagliostro, born Joseph Balsamo, is in his turn fleeced in London by Scot and Fry. The chapter then closes by conceding what it has spent its length resisting: the devotees ranged from honest seekers to charlatans, and the failed search did leave real knowledge — Geber chasing a chimera stumbled on corrosive sublimate, red oxide of mercury, nitric acid, nitrate of silver. But the concession is narrow, and worth reading carefully: these were accidents found while looking for something else, not progress toward the goal. Bernard of Trèves' seventy-one years of trials yielded no chemistry at all, and the one discovery he claimed near eighty-three was moral — contentment with his lot. Alchemy, Mackay ends, is spent in Europe but still thrives in the East; closing endnotes quietly deflate the marvels one last time, from Dee's show-stone as polished cannel coal to the clockwork hidden in Rosencreutz's tomb.
Key claims, with the lines that support them
Ordinary opinion took the adepts' already extravagant boasts and swelled them into outright magic, and the adepts profited by letting the legends stand.
Albertus Magnus was credited with a brazen statue that could speak until Aquinas smashed it, and with turning a frozen Cologne winter into summer to win land for a monastery; Artephius announced he was in his 1025th year and let his followers identify him with Apollonius of Tyana; Pietro d'Apone was universally believed to keep seven spirits in crystal vases and to have gold that flew home to him, a reputation that ended with his destruction by the Inquisition.
“and it is not to be wondered at that, when philosophers themselves pretended to discover an elixir for conferring immortality, or a red stone which was to create boundless wealth, that popular opinion should have enhanced upon their pretensions, and have endowed them with powers still more miraculous.”
The Alchymists; or Searchers for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Water of LifeRead in context →
The delusion was not confined to fools; it captured the strongest minds of the age.
Following on from the chain of named adepts, the author points to Roger Bacon, by far the most learned man of his time and the discoverer of real properties of lenses, who nonetheless believed firmly in the philosopher's stone and spent much of his life hunting it.
“Roger Bacon firmly believed in the philosopher’s stone, and spent much of his time in search of it.”
The Alchymists; or Searchers for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Water of LifeRead in context →
Where alchymists reasoned from an unexplained fortune back to successful transmutation, the author insists on worldly sources of the money.
Alchymists pointed to the eighteen million florins left by Pope John XXII in 1344 and asked how else he could have got it, simply taking for granted that the money was his and reinterpreting his bulls against gold-makers as aimed only at poor pretenders. Against this the author notes that the famous longevity receipt rests only on a later manuscript claim, that Naudé explains Lulli's six millions as revenue from a wool tax he had advised rather than transmuted metal, and that Flamel, who claimed to have turned mercury into gold in 1382 and endowed churches, was more plausibly a miser, usurer and debt-collector who lived on porridge in a mean apartment.
“They take it for granted that John really left this money, and ask by what possible means he could have accumulated it.”
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3 more claims
Governments could not decide whether transmutation was a crime or a revenue plan, and did both within fifty years.
An act of parliament in 1404 made gold-making a felony, yet Henry VI afterwards granted four patents to knights, chemists and priests to search for the stone so that the crown could pay its debts in real gold and silver; no gold was ever produced.
“In the year 1404 an act of parliament was passed declaring the making of gold and silver to be felony.”
The Alchymists; or Searchers for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Water of LifeRead in context →
Turning the argument around: the pursuit impoverished or destroyed everyone it touched, and loud success was more dangerous than failure.
Bernard of Trèves searched from fourteen to eighty-five, burning eight hundred crowns on Rhazes and two thousand more on Geber for nothing but fire and smoke, and ended a beggar and exile; Agrippa, honoured by emperors and praised by Melancthon and Erasmus, died destitute at forty-eight, and Paracelsus, self-styled monarch of medicine, died in a charity hospital. Those who advertised results fared no better — Seton displayed transmutation at Dresden and was jailed and racked to a skeleton, and Sendivogius was stripped and tied to a pillar by armed men, after which he feigned poverty and even passed false coin.
“and from the age of fourteen to that of eighty-five he was incessantly employed among the drugs and furnaces of his laboratory, wasting his life with the view of prolonging it, and reducing himself to beggary in the hopes of growing rich.”
The Alchymists; or Searchers for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Water of LifeRead in context →
The chapter closes by granting that this wasted search still left real knowledge behind.
Geber spent his life chasing a chimera yet stumbled on discoveries he was not looking for, and science owes him the first mention of corrosive sublimate, red oxide of mercury, nitric acid and nitrate of silver.
“But the life of Geber, though spent in the pursuit of this vain chimera, was not altogether useless.”
The Alchymists; or Searchers for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Water of LifeRead in context →
How it works
The 3 mechanisms the chapter’s argument runs on.
Mechanism 1
Discontent breeds both progress and delusion
The author begins by arguing that dissatisfaction with one's lot is what lifts people above animals and drives all improvement, but the same restlessness attaches itself to limits that cannot be removed: fear of death produces the elixir of life, want produces the gold-making stone, and ignorance of the future produces astrology and divination.
Mechanism 2
Secret work plus waiting periods makes failure unfalsifiable
Pretenders performed their operations away from the patron's eyes and prescribed long waiting intervals, so nothing could ever be checked at the moment it was claimed. Every empty result could then be blamed on the patron's doubts or on an interval not properly observed, as when digging under the oak yielded only inscribed slates and Prelati simply produced a fresh excuse and a planned pilgrimage.
Mechanism 3
Whoever reads the oracle controls the believer
The author shows the crystal had no power of its own: Dee's young son saw only a vague shadow and the level-headed Bartholomew got nothing at all, so the visions came from the interpreter's imagination and artifice. Because Kelly alone reported what the spirits said, he could study Dee's weaknesses and have the spirits command whatever he wanted, up to the sharing of wives.
Common misreadings
Since alchemy produced genuine chemical findings, it was essentially early chemistry heading in the right direction.
The author's point is narrower: the useful results were accidents, things Geber hit upon while not seeking them, while the actual goal never came any closer. Seventy-one years of systematic trials by Bernard of Trèves — rectified spirits, alum, copperas, sea-salt, egg-shells, vinegar, even excrement mixed with mercury and lead — produced no chemistry at all, and his one real discovery, as he said himself near eighty-three, was the moral one of being content with his lot.
“But the life of Geber, though spent in the pursuit of this vain chimera, was not altogether useless.”
The Alchymists; or Searchers for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Water of LifeRead in context →
Everyone who claimed to make gold or talk with spirits knew perfectly well he was lying.
The chapter separates the sincere enthusiast from the impostor working him. Dee genuinely believed in his crystal, kept labouring among furnaces until the fumes nearly poisoned him, and sank into poverty; it was Kelly who had studied Dee's weaknesses and made the spirits issue whatever orders suited himself, and once Kelly was gone the crystal yielded nothing to an honest man like Bartholomew.
“He had also deeply studied the character and the foibles of Dee; and he took his measures accordingly.”
The Alchymists; or Searchers for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Water of LifeRead in context →
Key concepts in The Alchymists; or Searchers for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Water of Life
- Discontent as civiliser and parent of folly
- Human dissatisfaction both drives progress and spawns absurd remedies for things that cannot be remedied.
- Where it applies: Explains motive, not the specific content of any one delusion.
- Three causes of discontent
- Death, toil and ignorance of the future, which respectively generate the elixir of life, the philosopher's stone and the divining arts.
- Where it applies: A classification of motives, not a historical chronology.
- Three classes of pretenders
- Alchymists, diviners, and quack-charm dealers — a sorting device that in practice blurs, since one man often played all three.
- Where it applies: Mackay admits the classes overlap, especially in early periods.
- Instructive value of past error
- Studying the follies of predecessors is like an adult reviewing childhood opinions: humbling and useful rather than contemptible.
- Where it applies: A reading stance, not a defence of the doctrines themselves.
- Metals as diseased gold
- The Byzantine theory that all metals are gold contaminated by foreign matter, so the stone need only purify them.
- Where it applies: One historical theory among several accounts of the stone.
- Elixir vitae
- A supposed preparation that halts ageing and adds centuries to a life.
- Where it applies: Claimed by reputation and anecdote, never demonstrated.
44 more concepts
- Self-cultivated marvel
- An adept quietly encouraging a flattering legend about himself because it increases his power.
- Where it applies: Applies where the adept neither asserts nor denies the tale.
- Popular imitativeness
- Belief spreading because respected figures pursue it, making others more eager still. Seekers cluster, swap receipts and excuses, and reinforce each other's hopes.
- Where it applies: Here it runs downward from learned men to their contemporaries. Here it is a small nightly coterie, not a mass market.
- Undivulged secret
- The adept's claim to possess the great secret while never showing it, which conveniently shields the claim from any test.
- Where it applies: Describes how reputations survive, not whether any chemistry worked.
- Wealth attributed to transmutation
- Unexplained riches are read backwards as proof that gold-making works.
- Where it applies: Only applies where ordinary sources of money are left uninvestigated.
- Folly of the age
- A brilliant mind adopting the one delusion its era could not yet see through.
- Where it applies: Excuses the era's shared error, not personal fraud.
- Perseverance misapplied
- Rare persistence and energy spent on an impossible object, so the virtue itself produces ruin.
- Where it applies: Describes the seeker's character, not the doctrine's truth; it explains waste, not why others believed.
- Alchymical miracle legend
- Believers dress a plain event, like finding hidden manuscripts, in supernatural detail to certify the art.
- Where it applies: Applies to adepts' retrospective storytelling, not to the documents themselves.
- Gambler's logic of the adept
- Past losses increase rather than cool the search, because only success could redeem what is already spent.
- Where it applies: A psychological analogy Mackay offers; it does not claim all adepts were gamblers.
- Hungry dependants
- Crowds of flattering pretenders who attach themselves to a rich seeker and help him spend his fortune.
- Where it applies: Explains how money drained away; distinct from the seeker's own sincere belief.
- Alchymy as a cover for ruin
- Treating gold-making as a way to keep up spending that income can no longer support.
- Where it applies: Describes motive, not chemical practice; applies to patrons, not working chemists.
- Staged apparition
- A pretender performs a conjuration alone or in trance, then reports what the devil supposedly said, so the dupe can never check it.
- Where it applies: Depends on the patron being excluded from the conjuration; fails once he witnesses it himself.
- Deferred proof
- The promised treasure is postponed by a set waiting period, so failure can always be blamed on impatience.
- Where it applies: A delay device for excuses; not a claim about any real process.
- Growing infatuation
- The delusion expands over time instead of shrinking as knowledge advances.
- Where it applies: Mackay claims it for alchemy's 16th-17th century phase, not as a universal law of all errors.
- Universalised philosopher's stone
- The stone was no longer just gold-making but a key to all sciences, health and spirits.
- Where it applies: Applies to the eminent 16th-17th century adepts, not the plain metal-transmuters before them.
- Self-trumpeted reputation
- Loud ceaseless self-praise can make an age accept a man's own valuation of himself.
- Where it applies: Explains fame, not actual attainment; Mackay still grants Agrippa real learning in several fields.
- Dangerous boasting believed
- Because claiming magic risked death, people assumed such claims must be true.
- Where it applies: A sociological reading of credulity in an age of witch trials.
- Alchymical self-ruin
- The pattern of repeatedly mortgaging real property to fund experiments that always shrink the capital.
- Where it applies: Describes the seeker's private economics, not public manias of whole nations.
- Substituted superstition
- Losing one false belief only to adopt another from a new community.
- Where it applies: Applies to Agricola's shift from the stone to mine-spirits; not a claim about all converts.
- Enthusiast and impostor pairing
- A self-deceived believer teamed with a knowing cheat, each making the other credible.
- Where it applies: Describes the duo's dynamic, not every alchymist, many of whom were purely self-deluded.
- Crystal consultation
- Gazing into a convex shew-stone while a scribe writes down what the 'spirits' say.
- Where it applies: Works only with an imaginative seer; honest or dull assistants see nothing.
- Farming the credulous patron
- Tailoring prophecies to a rich man's dearest wish so he keeps funding the experiments.
- Where it applies: Lasts only until the patron's estates or patience run out.
- Spiritualised alchymy
- The Rosicrucian upgrade of gold-making into a promise of health, happiness, command of spirits and universal knowledge.
- Where it applies: Describes the Rosicrucian reframing of claims, not any proven result.
- Extorting the secret
- Rulers imprisoning or torturing reputed adepts to force transmutation out of them.
- Where it applies: Applies to adepts who boasted publicly; silent practitioners escaped notice.
- Invisible brotherhood panic
- Public terror of an unseen secret society, fed by placards and pamphlets rather than any sighting.
- Where it applies: A Paris episode of 1623; belief outran all evidence of members.
- Nourishment without eating
- The claim that the body can be fed by air or by food laid on the skin rather than swallowed.
- Where it applies: Asserted as doctrine with only travellers' tales and a bathing analogy behind it.
- The mouth as gate of disease
- The idea that illness enters chiefly through eating, so avoiding the mouth avoids sickness.
- Where it applies: Rests on an analogy from sitting in water, not on observation of illness.
- Consummate impostor
- A gifted fraud whose eloquence, medical skill and religious claims win rich patrons repeatedly.
- Where it applies: Describes Borri's method of survival, not the chemistry he claimed.
- Double-bottomed crucible
- A pot with a painted wax upper floor hiding gold dust, so gold 'appears' after heating. A rigged vessel hiding gold so that transmutation appears to occur.
- Where it applies: Explains staged transmutations, not sincere experimental error. Only works while the operator controls the apparatus and the room.
- Testimony of high station
- Belief propped up by the rank of witnesses—kings, queens, learned men—rather than by evidence.
- Where it applies: Accounts for the delusion's spread; does not evaluate individual honesty.
- Half-gold nail trick
- A nail soldered from gold or silver and iron, the precious half painted black so acid seems to transmute it.
- Where it applies: Only convinces witnesses who cannot inspect the join or the paint.
- Feigned disinterestedness
- Giving up the profit and credit of a transmutation so as to look honest and earn patronage instead.
- Where it applies: Pays off only where courts and potentates reward promised rather than delivered gold.
- Eyewitness conviction
- Belief built from having seen and even performed the operation oneself, which outweighs prior reasoning.
- Where it applies: Fails as proof when the operator controls the materials and the setting.
- Inherited imposture
- A fraud passed from master to pupil as a trade, complete with jargon and props.
- Where it applies: Applies where the trick's value lies in reputation rather than any real technique.
- Elixir of life
- A claimed drug arresting old age, sold chiefly to the rich and ageing.
- Where it applies: Unlike transmutation, its failure is slow and deniable, so it is harder to expose.
- Competitive credulity
- Once belief starts, people outdo one another in believing more extravagant things.
- Where it applies: Needs an already-admired figure as the seed of the story.
- Arch-quack
- Mackay's label for the age's supreme charlatan, successor to St. Germain in the trade of making dupes
- Where it applies: A rank in a lineage of impostors, not a claim that his powers were real
- Cure by faith in the charlatan
- Patients improve because they believe utterly in the healer, giving quacks an edge over regular doctors
- Where it applies: Explains apparent cures, not any genuine elixir
- Reputation by hired enthusiasts
- Interpreters and hangers-on broadcast the adept's fame until crowds besiege his door
- Where it applies: Works only while the promoters themselves believe or profit
- Swindler cheated by believers
- The impostor's own dupes, convinced his powers are genuine, extort and ruin him
- Where it applies: Specific to a quack whose audience believes more than he does
- Useful by-products of delusion
- A false goal that nonetheless produces real knowledge along the way.
- Where it applies: Applies to inquiry with testable side-results, not to pure fraud.
- Classes of alchymical devotees
- Believers, princely and noble patrons, and knowing charlatans who exploit credulity.
- Where it applies: A typology of motive, not of method or success.
- Show-stone as cannel coal
- Dee's magic scrying stone turns out, on inspection, to be a polished lump of coal.
- Where it applies: Describes the surviving object's provenance, not proof about what Dee believed he saw.
- Clockwork marvel
- The self-rising armoured statue in Rosencreutz's vault was spring-loaded machinery, not magic.
- Where it applies: Reported as a Spectator legend by Budgell, not as verified history.
- Prodigality driving adeptship
- Laski's spending outran even huge wealth, so he turned to alchymy for a remedy.
- Where it applies: Attributed to Krasinski's sketch; applies to this one Polish magnate's case.
Reader’s notes on The Alchymists; or Searchers for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Water of LifeAI reading companion
“blow a soul into him with a pair of bellows!”
Read in context →Jonson's epigraph does the whole chapter's work in advance — the cookery verbs (broiled, sausage, bloat-herring) degrade transcendence into kitchen labor. Mackay never tops this.
“Dissatisfaction with his lot seems to be the characteristic of man in all ages and climates. So far, however, from being an evil”
Read in context →A shrewd opening move: he licenses the folly before mocking it, so the reader can laugh without disowning the impulse. Discontent as civiliser and as parent of absurdity — same root, two harvests.
“These are death, toil, and ignorance of the future”
Read in context →Elegant triad, and the three delusions map onto it one-to-one. Too neat, though — the taxonomy is imposed, not discovered, and he admits as much two paragraphs later when the categories won't stay separate.
17 more notes
“homœopathists, animal magnetisers, and all the motley tribe of quacks”
Read in context →Here's the hidden agenda surfacing: the medieval list suddenly includes 1840s contemporaries. He's not writing history, he's using history as a weapon against his own neighbours.
“Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors.”
Read in context →The humility is sincere but structurally unstable — his own analogy (society as adult looking back on childhood) assumes we've grown up. You can't claim the vantage and disclaim the pride.
“by no other means could he have made the powder of gold float upon the water”
Read in context →The alchemists' reading of Exodus is a lovely specimen of motivated exegesis — scripture as lab notebook. And Mackay's "we must leave this knotty point" is pure deadpan.
“his assertion, being unsupported, is worth nothing”
Read in context →Note the double standard he doesn't notice: Martini gets dismissed in eight words, but Albertus melting the Rhine gets a full page of loving detail. Evidence standards tighten and loosen by how fun the story is.
“all the metals laboured under disease, with the exception of gold, which was the only one in perfect health”
Read in context →This is the real key to alchemy and Mackay passes it too fast — transmutation wasn't manufacture, it was medicine. Metals, bodies, souls all curable by the same stone. The elixir and the stone were never two projects.
“science is indebted to him for the first mention of corrosive sublimate, the red oxide of mercury, nitric acid”
Read in context →"Stumbled upon discoveries which he did not seek" — the one concession that complicates his whole thesis. Error wasn't merely wasteful; it was the only available method.
“he set the grave philosophers, sultan and all, dancing as fast as their legs could carry them”
Read in context →Alfarabi's lute scene belongs to a different genre entirely — courtly anecdote, not case study. And then the flat murder in the desert, one clause long. The tonal whiplash is the best writing in the segment.
“He could not rule his own passions, but gave himself up to wine and women”
Read in context →The moralising here is cheaper than elsewhere — debauchery explains nothing about alchemy, yet it's offered as the cautionary payoff. Victorian habit overriding the argument.
“he should relapse, when at the height of his fame, into his former incapacity and stupidity”
Read in context →A chilling condition hidden inside a miracle — the Virgin's gift carries its own revocation. Folk imagination always prices genius as a loan.
“it chattered much more than was agreeable to either philosopher”
Read in context →The brazen head legend domesticated into a servant problem, and Aquinas settling it with a hammer. Mackay's comedy works because he refuses to flag it as comedy.
“the singing-birds fell dead—the leaves dropped from the trees”
Read in context →He stages the second half of the miracle to get his real point across: the magician gives nothing freely, and the spring was a transaction for a plot of land. Wonder in service of a property deal.
“he was at that time in the thousand and twenty-fifth year of his age!”
Read in context →Artephius is the purest case — the claim is self-authenticating because unfalsifiable, and the chapter notes he had "an excellent memory" and "thorough knowledge of all existing history." The fraud needed scholarship.
“The Dominican writers deny that he ever sought the philosopher’s stone, but his treatise upon minerals sufficiently proves that he did.”
Read in context →Here he actually does the historian's work — weighing partisan denial against textual evidence. One sentence of real method amid pages of anecdote, which makes the rest look more lax by contrast.
“they are to be fed upon broth made of serpents and vinegar, which broth is to be thickened with wheat and bran”
Read in context →The recipe's logic is pure sympathetic magic laundered through a kitchen: serpents shed skins, therefore the chicken that eats them renews you. Mackay just reports it deadpan and lets the absurdity do its own work.
“It is right to state that M. Harcouet has but little authority for attributing this precious composition to Arnold of Villeneuve”
Read in context →Note the joke of the source-check: he's scrupulous about attribution for a document whose content is nonsense. Scholarly rigour applied to serpent broth.
“Whenever he disbursed gold, he muttered a certain charm, known only to himself, and next morning the gold was safe again in his own possession”
Read in context →A beautifully revealing legend — it's not really about magic, it's a debtor's reputation turned supernatural. The man who never paid became the man whose coins flew home.
“He died in prison ere his trial was concluded, but was afterwards found guilty. His bones were ordered to be dug up and publicly burned.”
Read in context →The flattest sentence in the segment and the most chilling. The Inquisition's bureaucracy outlives its defendant — a verdict delivered to a corpse.
A reader’s takeAI reading companion
Humility undermined by the very analogy meant to express it
Read whole, this chapter is less a history than a long parade with a thesis hidden in its rhythm. Mackay opens with Jonson's bellows-and-sausage mockery — kitchen verbs collapsing transcendence into cookery — and that epigraph does more argumentative work than anything that follows. He then makes his shrewdest move: licensing the folly before mocking it. Discontent, he says, is the engine of civilisation; the same restlessness that builds cities also breeds the elixir, the stone and the false sciences. Death, toil and ignorance of the future give him an elegant triad, each matched to a delusion — too elegant, in fact, since the taxonomy is imposed rather than discovered, and he concedes within pages that his three classes of deceiver will not stay separate. And the modern grudge surfaces early: when the medieval roll-call suddenly admits homœopathists and animal magnetisers, we learn that the past is a weapon aimed at his own neighbours. His plea against the pride of superior knowledge is sincere but structurally unstable — the analogy of society as an adult recalling childhood claims the very vantage it disclaims.
Then the gallery: Geber, Alfarabi dancing a sultan's court off its feet before dying in one flat clause of desert murder, Avicenna ruined by wine and women in a moralising that explains nothing about alchemy, Albertus and his brazen head silenced by Aquinas's hammer, Artephius self-authenticating at 1025 years, Arnold's serpent broth, Lulli, Bacon, Flamel, Ripley, Basil Valentine, Bernard of Trèves ruined over seventy years and oddly content at the end, then the plunge into Gilles de Rays, where alchemy drains into devil-raising and child-murder, and Pietro d'Apone, whose bones are dug up and burned by a bureaucracy that outlives its defendant. After the mid-sixteenth century the thing mutates: no longer a metallurgical trick but a mystical system promising health, visible spirits and communion with God — Rosencreutz, Agrippa's self-trumpeting, Paracelsus crowning himself monarch of medicine and dying in a pauper hospital, Zachaire mortgaging estate after estate, Dee's polished cannel-coal crystal turned by the ear-less Kelly into a machine for farming patrons until a spirit conveniently commanded wife-swapping, Heydon insisting air's "fine foreign fatness" and a chop plastered on the skin will feed a man for centuries, Borri, Helvetius, and at last the eighteenth century's confidence men: Delisle converting a sceptical bishop by sheer eyewitness spectacle and dying shot in the Bastille, his stepson Aluys escaping through a gaoler's daughter, St. Germain with his undated diamonds and centuries of memory, Balsamo of Palermo renaming himself Cagliostro and being fleeced in London by sharper crooks than himself.
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What I saw through: the architecture is sturdier than the scholarship. Evidence standards tighten and loosen according to how entertaining the story is — Martini is dismissed in eight words while Albertus melting the Rhine gets a loving page, and the Dominican denial about Albertus's minerals treatise is weighed with real method exactly once, which only exposes the laxity elsewhere. More importantly, Mackay walks past his own best insight. He records that all metals were thought diseased save gold, "the only one in perfect health," and then hurries on — but that single sentence dissolves his tidy division of elixir from stone. Transmutation was never manufacture; it was medicine. Metals, bodies and souls were one patient, curable by one remedy. That is why the sixteenth-century drift into mysticism is not degeneration but the idea arriving at its own conclusion, and why his chronology reads as decline only because his categories were wrong at the start. His second unassimilated admission is the final paragraph's concession that the delusion yielded genuine chemistry — Bacon stumbling on nitric acid and corrosive sublimate, discoveries "which he did not seek." Error was not merely wasteful; for centuries it was the only available method, and no thesis about wasted lives survives that intact.
The legends repay closer reading than Mackay's ridicule allows. The coins that fly home each morning are not magic but a defaulter's reputation turned supernatural. The Virgin's gift of genius revocable at the height of fame is folk imagination pricing talent as a loan. The magician's spring, paid for with a plot of land, shows wonder conscripted into a property deal. Alchemy's rhetoric of disinterest — the adept who wants no money — was, as he rightly notes, the finest lure for patronage ever devised, and the trick crucibles Geoffroy exposed in 1722 were only its machinery.
To the reader: do not take this chapter as a settled verdict on credulous ancestors. Take it as a study of how a question can be rational and its answers insane at once. The alchymists were not fools for wanting the body healed and matter perfected; they were defeated by the absence of any way to tell a result from a wish — and the Bishop of Senés, whose years of distrust collapsed before one afternoon's spectacle, is the chapter's real warning, because he is us. Mackay's closing line that alchemy is spent in Europe but thrives in the East should be read with his own humility rather than his pride: the delusion did not die, it changed address. It was changing address in his own London, among the quacks he could not resist naming, and it has not stopped since.
Read The Alchymists; or Searchers for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Water of Life with these cards beside each passage.
Open in FeedLitraModern Prophecies
Why does a failed date discredit the prophet but not prophecy itself?
How Modern Prophecies unfoldsAI-assisted
The opening: a recurring epidemic, not an isolated folly. Mackay begins by framing prophecies of doom as a disease that returns in waves rather than a one-off blunder. His first exhibit is the approach of the year 1000, when pilgrims sold their goods, let their buildings fall to ruin, and set out for the East — an opening chosen because it establishes two things at once: that the delusion is ancient and periodic, and that it is expensive. The point of entry is not that people believed something silly but that belief reorganized their lives. From there he widens to comets and to the plague years of 1345–1350, when self-appointed prophets surfaced in the chief cities of Germany, France, and Italy announcing judgment within a decade. This gives him his governing mechanism early: calamity lowers the evidentiary bar. People already suffering stop demanding proof, which is also why, on Defoe's testimony, Londoners in the plague year 1665 devoured prophecies and almanacs.
The development: a catalogue of dated panics, each collapsing on schedule. The middle of the chapter accumulates instances, and the accumulation is the argument. Whiston's date of 1736, Bell's predicted earthquake of 1761, the Leeds prophetic eggs, the Thames flood forecast for 1524 — Mackay lets them pile up so the reader starts anticipating the ending before he writes it. The 1524 case supplies his best measure of cost: at least twenty thousand people walked out of London ahead of a flood that never came. The Leeds eggs supply the comic deflation: once it emerged that the letters had been inked on and the eggs pushed back into the hen, those who had been praying were left laughing. And the fire of London supplies the darkest turn within this stretch — a prophecy of unavoidable ruin helped produce the ruin, since hundreds who believed the city's fate was sealed judged resistance pointless and stood by while streets they could have saved burned. Fatalism is not merely false here; it is an accelerant.
The turn: from dated panics to named seers, and from failure to forgery. Having shown that a prophecy naming a day destroys itself when the day passes quietly, Mackay pivots to the British popular prophets — Mother Shipton, Merlin, Peter of Pontefract, Robert Nixon — and with them the question changes. These reputations survive, so he must explain survival rather than collapse. His answer is composition after the fact. Heywood's Merlin verses describe a hunch-backed monster born with teeth and feet foremost, and a rival landing to meet him: detail no contemporary could have possessed in advance. The HEMPE acrostic fits Henry, Edward, Mary, Philip, and Elizabeth so tidily that Mackay treats Heywood, not Merlin, as the real author. The apparent accuracy is the tell, not the credential. He also notes that even the 1524 astrologers had a dodge available — shifting the flood a century forward to 1624 — and that Peter of Pontefract's followers simply decided the pope had reigned instead, while Heywood, when his forecast failed, reread his own words.
The close: undateable prophecies, a moral non sequitur, and a dismissal. The chapter ends on the prophecies that cannot be caught, because they name no year and can always be deferred. In the town Mother Shipton's verse condemns, people sincerely expect destruction yet fear it no more urgently now than two centuries hence; the line about invaders with snow on their helmets is still read by old women as a Russian war yet to come. Mackay then quotes Nixon's biographers, who abandon prediction for moralizing — a non sequitur he lets stand without comment, since the swerve exposes itself. He signs off by refusing one last subject: the almanac-makers are too trivial to be commemorated beside Merlin, Shipton, and Nixon. It is a deliberately anticlimactic ending, and the anticlimax is the verdict — the great pretenders have at least the dignity of having deceived on a grand scale.
Key claims, with the lines that support them
Belief in prophecies of doom runs highest exactly when people are already suffering.
The author points to the plague years 1345-1350, when self-appointed prophets appeared in the main cities of Germany, France and Italy announcing judgment within ten years, and to Defoe's report that Londoners during the 1665 plague were unusually addicted to prophecies and almanacs — the second case resting on Defoe's testimony.
“Credulity is always greatest in times of calamity.”
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Building on that, such belief is not idle talk: it drives people into choices that cost them dearly.
Before the year 1000 pilgrims sold their goods and possessions and let their buildings fall into ruin before setting out for the East; before the predicted Thames flood of 1524 at least twenty thousand people had walked out of London.
“Buildings of every sort were suffered to fall into ruins.”
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Worse, a prophecy of unavoidable ruin can help bring the ruin about.
At the great fire of London the belief that the city's fate was sealed convinced onlookers that resistance was useless, so hundreds who could have given real help and saved whole streets did nothing.
“They had a most pernicious effect upon the mind of the vulgar, as they induced a belief in fatalism.”
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3 more claims
Seen from the other side, a prophecy that names a day destroys itself once the day passes quietly.
The Leeds prophetic eggs lost their terror as soon as it came out that the letters had been inked on and the eggs pushed back into the hen, and those who had been praying ended up laughing; the 1524 astrologers saved themselves only by shifting the flood a full century forward to 1624.
“Bell lost all credit in a short time, and was looked upon even by the most credulous as a mere madman.”
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Turning from dated panics to the famous British seers, the author argues that celebrated "prophecies" were written after the events they appear to foresee.
Heywood's Merlin verses describe a hunch-backed monster born with teeth and feet foremost and a rival landing to meet him — detail nobody could have had in advance — and the HEMPE acrostic fits Henry, Edward, Mary, Philip and Elizabeth far too neatly, which is why the author treats Heywood as the real author.
“They seem, however, to have been all written by Heywood himself.”
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The prophecies that last are the ones that never name a year, because they can always be put off.
In the town Mother Shipton's verse condemns, people sincerely believe the destruction is coming yet fear it no more urgently now than two hundred years hence; likewise the line about invaders with snow on their helmets is read by old women as a war with Russia still to come.
“Happily for their peace of mind, the prophet said nothing of the year that was to witness the awful calamity; so that they think it as likely to be two centuries hence as now.”
Modern PropheciesRead in context →
How it works
The 3 mechanisms the chapter’s argument runs on.
Mechanism 1
Calamity lowers the bar for belief
When plague or disaster is already causing suffering, people stop demanding proof and accept prophets they would otherwise laugh at. That is why pretended seers multiplied across German, French and Italian cities during the 1345-1350 plague, and why Londoners in 1665 devoured prophecies and almanacs.
Mechanism 2
Fatalism makes the disaster worse
Once a crowd believes the ruin is already written, effort looks pointless and hope drains away. In the 1666 fire hundreds who could have fought the flames and saved whole districts simply stood by, so the prophecy helped bring about the scale of destruction it announced.
Mechanism 3
Vague wording makes failure unprovable
A prophecy that is symbolic or carries no year can never be caught out. If the event misses, believers read the words differently — as Heywood did when his HEMPE forecast failed — and if no date was given, the calamity is simply assumed to be still pending.
Common misreadings
Those old verses matched later history so exactly that the prophets must have had some genuine foresight.
The precision is the giveaway: the texts were composed once the outcome was known and then passed off as ancient. Heywood's Richard III lines and his tidy HEMPE acrostic contain details no contemporary could have had, which is why the author credits them to Heywood rather than to Merlin.
“They seem, however, to have been all written by Heywood himself.”
Modern PropheciesRead in context →
Once a prediction visibly fails, the believers are cured.
That holds only for prophecies pinned to a date, like Bell's earthquake or the Leeds eggs. Where the wording is symbolic or no year is given, failure is absorbed — Peter of Pontefract's followers decided the pope had reigned instead, Heywood reread his failed forecast, and the undated Shipton verse is still awaited.
“Bell lost all credit in a short time, and was looked upon even by the most credulous as a mere madman.”
Modern PropheciesRead in context →
Key concepts in Modern Prophecies
- Epidemic terror of the end of the world
- A dread of imminent doom that spreads through a population like a disease, driven by dated prophecy.
- Where it applies: Describes mass contagious fear, not individual religious belief.
- Credulity in times of calamity
- Suffering lowers the threshold of proof, so people accept prophets they would otherwise mock.
- Where it applies: Explains timing of belief, not its specific content.
- Popular imitativeness
- People flee or believe because they see neighbours doing it, not because of the evidence. Rumour multiplies as crowds add tales to tales around a famous name.
- Where it applies: Applies where panic is visible to others; private fear need not spread. Here describes rumour growth, not conscious fraud by the prophet.
- Fatalism from prophecy
- Belief that doom is written removes hope and effort, making the harm worse.
- Where it applies: Concerns prophecy's practical effects, not its truth.
- Prophecy after the event
- Predictions written once the outcome is known, then presented as ancient foresight.
- Where it applies: Applies to texts whose precision exceeds what any contemporary could know.
- Allegorical escape clause
- When a prophecy fails, believers reinterpret it so it still counts as fulfilled.
- Where it applies: Only possible where wording is vague or symbolic.
3 more concepts
- Undated prophecy
- A prediction with no fixed date, so it can never be proved wrong and always stays pending.
- Where it applies: Applies to prophecies that name an event but omit a year; dated ones like the 1842 earthquake rumour can expire.
- Retrospective fitting
- Bending later events until they match the words of an old prophecy.
- Where it applies: Describes how believers read fulfilment in, not any genuine predictive accuracy.
- Almanac-makers
- Yearly weather and fortune predictors such as Lilly, Partridge and Francis Moore, who forecast only one year ahead.
- Where it applies: Contrasted with Merlin, Shipton and Nixon, who ranged over centuries and larger subjects.
Reader’s notes on Modern PropheciesAI reading companion
“Buildings of every sort were suffered to fall into ruins. It was thought useless to repair them”
Read in context →The sharpest detail in the whole opening: belief measured not by what people say but by what they stop maintaining. A civilization audits its own faith through its roofs.
“the comet is no longer looked upon as the sign, but the agent of destruction”
Read in context →Mackay catches science relocating the terror rather than curing it. The heavens stop speaking and start colliding — same dread, new physics.
“Most people thought that the first would have been a more appropriate day”
Read in context →He can't resist the April Fool's joke mid-catastrophe. That dry aside is the book's real method: ridicule as disinfectant.
17 more notes
“hundreds who had laughed at the prediction a week before, packed up their goods, when they saw others doing so”
Read in context →Here's the actual mechanism — not credulity but imitation. People flee the crowd's movement, not the prophecy.
“At this explanation, those who had prayed, now laughed, and the world wagged as merrily as of yore”
Read in context →Repentance that evaporates the instant the deadline does. Devastating little clause — their souls were only ever as deep as the evidence.
“By taking away the hope of recovery—that greatest balm in every malady—they increased threefold the ravages of the disease”
Read in context →The prophecy doesn't just predict, it kills. Fatalism as an epidemiological factor — surprisingly modern claim for 1841.
“any man who wanted to be rid of an enemy, had only to say that he had seen him besmearing a door”
Read in context →Mass panic always ends up subcontracted to private grudges. The supernatural plot is just a delivery system for ordinary malice.
“He confessed at last, when his courage was worn down by torture”
Read in context →The rack manufactures the very evidence that justifies the rack. Mora's confession proves nothing except how confessions are made.
“The crowds that were brought together to witness the executions spread the infection among one another”
Read in context →One sentence, and the whole thing closes into a loop: the cure for the plague is the plague's best transport. Mackay lets the irony stand unremarked.
“playing at leap-frog over one another’s backs”
Read in context →The one unconvincing note in a visionary's hell — and that's why it convinces. Nobody inventing a lie reaches for frolicking skeletons.
“scores of witnesses, half crazed by disease, came forward to swear that they also had seen”
Read in context →A story told often enough becomes other people's memory. Testimony multiplies by hearing, not by seeing.
“An epidemic frenzy was abroad, which seemed to be as contagious as the plague”
Read in context →He says it as metaphor; the Milan chapter has already shown it's literal. Delusion travels the same crowded streets as the pathogen.
“the prior, with a prudent forethought, admitted only his personal friends, and those who brought stores of eatables”
Read in context →Doomsday with a guest list. Even at the end of the world, the apocalypse gets privatized and means-tested.
“by an error (a very slight one,) of a little figure, they had fixed the date of this awful inundation a whole century too early”
Read in context →The eternal escape hatch: the stars were never wrong, only the arithmetic. Failed prophecy doesn't die, it reschedules.
“Mother Shipton, in one of her prophecies, had said that London would be reduced to ashes, and they refused to make any efforts to prevent it”
Read in context →The costliest line here — belief in fate burns a city that hands with buckets could have saved. Prediction becomes arson by inaction.
“As many more gave themselves up, with the less compunction, to plunder a city which they could not save”
Read in context →Fatalism as moral permission slip. Once the ending is written, looting is just tidying up.
“Here lies she who never lied, Whose skill often has been tried”
Read in context →An epitaph as self-certifying evidence — the proof of the prophet is a rhyme carved by her believers. Circular, and durable for it.
“when London and Highgate are joined by one continuous line of houses”
Read in context →Clever prophecy: it waits on something sure to happen anyway. Urban sprawl supplies the trigger, and dread gets a guaranteed future date.
“They are in terms too plain and positive to allow any one to doubt for a moment of their having been composed ex post facto.”
Read in context →The tell is precision. Real prophecy must be vague to survive; Heywood's verses are too well-tailored to the corpse they dress.
“H signifieth King Henry before-named; E, Edward, his son, the sixth of that name”
Read in context →Acrostics are the cheapest machine for manufacturing fate — five letters, five reigns, and any five letters would have served.
A reader’s takeAI reading companion
How apocalyptic panic narrows from mass terror into a verse-mill
Read as one piece, "Modern Prophecies" moves from the grand to the shabby, and the descent is the argument. It opens with whole populations convinced of an imminent end — the year-1000 pilgrims, the comet panics, the plague prophecies of Milan and London, Whiston's 1736, Bell's 1761 earthquake, the Leeds egg, the Thames flood of 1524 — and then narrows, in this chapter, to the prophets themselves: Mother Shipton, Merlin, Peter of Pontefract, Nixon, and finally the almanac-makers Mackay waves off as beneath commemoration. The terror shrinks into a trade. What begins as the sky falling ends as a verse-mill, and the reader who has followed the whole arc sees that it was always a verse-mill; the sky was the marketing.
What I came away seeing most clearly is that Mackay has quietly stopped writing about belief and started writing about behaviour. Faith is audited not by professions but by abandonment: the unrepaired roofs, the city that will burn because Shipton said it would and so the buckets stay idle, the looters who treat a doomed town as already salvage. Fatalism is not a private error here — it builds, or rather unbuilds, in public. And the engine of the panics is not credulity but imitation: hundreds who laughed at the prediction a week earlier pack their goods when they see the neighbours packing. People flee the crowd's movement, not the prophecy. That is why repentance evaporates the instant the deadline does, why those who prayed are laughing within the hour; the devotion was only ever as deep as the evidence that produced it.
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The Milan material is where the chapter turns from comedy to indictment, and it deserves to be read as the chapter's moral centre rather than one episode among many. Prophecy there does not merely predict; it kills. Stripping the sick of hope multiplies the mortality — a startlingly modern claim for 1841, fatalism entered as an epidemiological variable. The supernatural plot becomes a delivery system for ordinary malice, since any man wanting rid of an enemy need only report seeing him smear a door. Torture manufactures the confession that licenses the torture. And the crowds assembled to watch the poisoners die carry the contagion home to one another: the cure is the plague's best transport. Mackay sets that loop down and declines to comment, which is the right choice — the sentence does more unremarked.
He is equally good on the machinery of survival. A failed prophecy does not die; it reschedules, and the stars are never wrong, only the arithmetic — an error of one small figure, a century early. The durable prophecies are the undated and the vague; the ones that wait on something certain to happen anyway, like London and Highgate joining in a single line of houses, get a guaranteed future and the dread that comes with it. Precision is the tell of forgery, not of foresight: verses too exactly tailored to the corpse they dress were cut after the death. Acrostics are the cheapest fate-machine ever built — five letters, five reigns, and any five letters would have served. And the proof of the prophet turns out to be a rhyme carved by her own believers: here lies she who never lied. Circular, and all the more durable for it.
The method is as instructive as the matter. Mackay works by ridicule as disinfectant — the April Fool's aside dropped into a catastrophe, the prior admitting only friends who bring provisions, so that even the end of the world arrives with a guest list and a means test. He trusts the small detail over the large denunciation, and he is honest enough to leave in the one note no fabricator would invent, the skeletons playing leap-frog, which is precisely why that vision convinces as a thing someone genuinely saw. His closing gesture — half-dismissing almanac-makers as too trivial to stand beside Merlin and Shipton, after quoting Nixon's biographers' moralizing non sequitur with visible distaste — admits something he may not have intended: the trivial trade is the species' survival form. The grand panic is rare; the cheap annual prediction is perennial.
What I would tell the reader is this. Do not file the chapter as a museum of old gullibility. The pattern it isolates is portable and does not require belief in comets: a fear that spreads by being seen to spread, testimony that multiplies by hearing rather than seeing, a prediction vague enough to never fail and a deadline elastic enough to be moved, and above all the cost paid not in the catastrophe that never came but in what people stopped doing while they waited for it. Watch for the unrepaired roof. That is where the delusion keeps its accounts.
Read Modern Prophecies with these cards beside each passage.
Open in FeedLitraFortune-Telling
Why did governments reward astrologers but execute necromancers?
How Fortune-Telling unfoldsAI-assisted
How it opens. Mackay begins not by disputing any particular prediction but by going after the premise beneath all of them. The wish to know the future, he says, is universal, and its root is vanity: because we assume creation is arranged around us, we assume the heavens must be posting bulletins about our personal fates — an assumption that then gets dressed up as a science of nativities. His counter is a matter of proportion rather than evidence. Measured against the universe, a man is smaller than the insects crawling on a leaf are against the whole globe; we would laugh at a worm that supposed the sky had been organized to announce its destiny. Strip the self-importance away and judicial astrology has nothing left to stand on. That opening move sets the chapter's method: explain the appetite first, and the particular follies will follow from it.
How it develops. Having accounted for the demand, he turns to how authority met it, and finds the treatment flatly incoherent. Necromancy was a capital offence, while astrology was officially encouraged and its practitioners treated as useful men: Lilly and Booker were feasted at the parliamentary army's headquarters at Windsor and graciously received by Fairfax — honours for predicting outcomes at a moment when a rival way of predicting outcomes could cost a life. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the golden age of the trade, with figures like Lilly and Nostradamus courted by states. And the next claim follows directly: once governments rewarded prophecy, the craft's business was to look right rather than be right. Lilly identified a 1588 prophecy's "dreadful dead man" as General Monk and its "royal G" as Charles II — after the Restoration had already happened. The German astrologer summoned at Louis XIV's birth produced only the flattering verdict that the child would reign long, harshly and happily, which no courtier could have expected to hear otherwise. The three prophecies credited to Tibertus, about Guido, himself and Malatesta, were written up once the events were over.
The catalogue. The body of this chapter then becomes an inventory: the species of divination, the rules for reading dreams, omens, and calendars of lucky and unlucky days — divination surviving into Mackay's own time in cards, tea-cups and palms. The organizing argument here is a contrast between variation and constancy. The assigned meanings contradict each other from country to country: an English peasant girl wakes delighted after dreaming of a rose while her Normandy counterpart reads the same rose as a promise of vexation; an oak signifies long life to an Englishman and approaching calamity to a Swiss. Yet the impulse underneath never varies. Mother Bridget's English calendar of charm-days and an eastern creed in which every movement, colour and sound carries a message are one appetite in different local dress, each people reading signs off whatever its own climate and landscape happen to supply. Local scenery colours the interpretation; it does not touch the motive.
The turn. The chapter's sharpest pivot is from cataloguing the lore to weighing what it actually does to people, and the verdict is that it manufactures dread rather than comfort. Once ordinary events count as messages, nothing is too trivial to alarm an imagination already hunting for warnings, and people prove far more inventive at tormenting themselves than at reassuring themselves — so the stock of ill omens vastly outgrows the lucky ones. Mackay borrows Addison, writing a century and a quarter earlier, for the catalogue: a shooting star that ruins a night's rest, a cricket's chirp more dreadful than a lion's roar. He then closes off the comfortable escape that this is a disease of the ignorant poor, citing a general who had led an army creditably and was unnerved by a winding-sheet shape in the candle, and learned men who took a howling dog to mean they would lose a child. Schooling changes the vocabulary of the superstition, not the hunger behind it.
How it closes. The ending balances two facts rather than declaring victory. On the credit side, preaching and philosophy never argued the trade out of existence, but shame has driven it out of sight: prophets who once practised openly in daylight now have to skulk in secret. On the debit side, the paying demand held up. Footnotes carry the weight here, and they re-prove the chapter's central mechanism: Nostradamus's deliberately vague lines — free of names, dates and places, so no event can contradict them — were fitted after the fact to Napoleon's escape from Elba and to the warring royal brothers Don Miguel and Don Pedro, readers supplying the missing specifics themselves. (The trick collapses only where a prediction was dated and specific in advance.) Alongside that, the brisk market in cheap oracle and dream books: some eleven thousand copies a year, roughly 330,000 over thirty years, across more than fifty London editions, sold at a penny to sixpence chiefly to servant-girls and poorly educated readers. The improvement Mackay records is therefore in public respectability, not in appetite — and he is scrupulous enough to flag that the sales figures rest on one unnamed informant's estimate rather than any survey.
Key claims, with the lines that support them
The conviction that the future can be read off the heavens rests on human vanity rather than on any evidence.
Mackay opens the chapter with a proportion argument instead of a refutation of particular predictions: measured against the universe, a man is smaller than the insects crawling on a leaf are against the whole globe, and we would laugh at a worm that thought the sky was arranged to announce its destiny. Strip away the self-importance and the premise of judicial astrology — that the stars are talking about you — has nothing left to stand on.
“An undue opinion of our own importance in the scale of creation is at the bottom of all our unwarrantable notions in this respect.”
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Governments punished one claim to read the future with death while courting and rewarding the other.
Having explained why the appetite exists, the author turns to how authority handled it, and finds the treatment incoherent: necromancy was a capital offence, yet astrology was officially encouraged and its practitioners made useful men. Lilly and Booker were feasted at the parliamentary army's headquarters at Windsor and graciously received by Fairfax — honours for predicting outcomes, at a time when a rival method of predicting outcomes could cost a life.
“While astrology was encouraged, and its professors courted and rewarded, necromancers were universally condemned to the stake or the gallows.”
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Astrologers' reputations were built on vague wording, verdicts that flattered their patrons, and tales composed after the outcome was already known.
This follows directly from the previous point: once the state rewarded prophecy, the craft's job was to look right rather than be right. Lilly read a 1588 prophecy's "dreadful dead man" as General Monk and its "royal G" as Charles II, after the Restoration had happened. The German astrologer called in at Louis XIV's birth returned only the flattering verdict that the child would reign long, harshly and happily — no courtier could have expected worse. And the three prophecies credited to Tibertus, about Guido, himself and Malatesta, were written up once the events were over.
“A little ingenuity, like that evinced by Lilly in his explanation about General Monk and the dreadful dead man, might easily make events to fit some of them.”
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3 more claims
The meanings assigned to dreams and omens differ sharply from nation to nation, yet the impulse underneath them is everywhere the same wish to pry into what has been hidden.
The author sets the variation and the constant against each other. On variation: an English peasant girl wakes delighted after dreaming of a rose, while her Normandy counterpart takes the same rose as a promise of vexation; an oak means long life to an Englishman and approaching calamity to a Swiss. On the constant: Mother Bridget's calendar of charm-days in England and an eastern creed in which every movement, colour and sound carries a message are the same appetite in different local dress, each people reading signs off whatever its own climate and landscape supply. Local scenery colours the interpretation; it does not touch the motive.
“It should be observed that the rules for the interpretation of dreams are far from being universal.”
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Omen-belief yields far more frightening signs than cheering ones, and it is not a weakness of the ignorant poor alone.
Mackay borrows Addison, writing a century and a quarter earlier, for the catalogue of self-inflicted terror: a shooting star that spoils a night's rest, a cricket's chirp more dreadful than a lion's roar — nothing is too trivial to alarm an imagination already looking for warnings. He then blocks the comfortable assumption that only the uneducated feel this, noting a general who had led an army creditably and was unnerved by a winding-sheet in the candle, and learned men who took a howling dog to mean they would lose a child.
“The latter are in the greatest number, so much more ingenious are we in tormenting ourselves than in discovering reasons for enjoyment in the things that surround us.”
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Sermons and philosophy never argued fortune-telling out of existence; shame pushed it out of sight while the paying appetite for it stayed large.
The chapter closes by weighing two facts against each other. On the improvement side, prophets who once practised openly in daylight now have to skulk in secret. On the other side, the trade in cheap oracle and dream books held steady: eleven thousand-odd copies a year, roughly 330,000 over thirty years, with more than fifty London editions, bought at a penny to sixpence mainly by servant-girls and poorly educated readers. The decline is therefore in public respectability, not in demand — though the sales figures come from one unnamed informant's estimate rather than any survey.
“Still it is evident that these follies have greatly diminished.”
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How it works
The 3 mechanisms the chapter’s argument runs on.
Mechanism 1
Vanity inflates man into the stars' subject
The author traces star-reading back to an overblown sense of our own importance: because we assume creation centers on us, we assume the heavens must be signalling our personal fates, and that assumption gets dressed up as a science of nativities. His scale argument answers it — relative to the universe a man is smaller than an insect on a leaf, so the stars have no reason to be bulletins about him.
Mechanism 2
Vague wording plus hindsight manufactures fulfilled prophecy
Prophetic verses are kept free of names, dates and places, so no event can ever contradict them. Once something notable happens, readers supply the missing specifics themselves and the verse looks like foresight; the same loose lines about an escaped captive or two warring royal brothers were fitted to Napoleon's Elba and to Don Miguel and Don Pedro. The trick collapses only where a prediction was dated and specific beforehand.
Mechanism 3
Sign-reading mostly produces dread, not comfort
Once ordinary events count as messages, every trivial thing can be read as a warning, and the author notes people are far more inventive at tormenting themselves than at reassuring themselves. So the stock of ill omens vastly outgrows the lucky ones, and the net yield of the habit is needless fear — a shooting star ruining a night's sleep, a cricket frightening a man more than a lion's roar.
Common misreadings
Reading omens and dreams is something only poor, uneducated people fall for, so education by itself dissolves it.
The author explicitly denies the limitation, and his examples are people with standing and learning: a general of good service who was alarmed by a winding-sheet shape in the candle, and educated men who believed a howling dog foretold the death of a child. Schooling changes the vocabulary of the superstition, not the appetite that drives it.
“A belief in omens is not confined to the humble and uninformed.”
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Since Mackay reports that fortune-telling has visibly declined and its practitioners now hide, the preaching and reasoning aimed at it had essentially finished the job by his day.
What he records is a change in visibility rather than in appetite: prophets went from daylight practice to skulking in secret, while the cheap-oracle trade ran at about eleven thousand copies a year — some 330,000 over thirty years, across more than fifty London editions. The surviving demand is precisely what he sets as the limit on how much argument achieved, and he flags that the sales number rests on a single informant.
“Still it is evident that these follies have greatly diminished.”
Fortune-TellingRead in context →
Key concepts in Fortune-Telling
- Presumption of foreknowledge
- Treating the hidden future as something man may and should decipher, turned into formal 'sciences'.
- Where it applies: Mackay exempts divine revelation and pagan oracles from this discussion.
- Judicial astrology
- Casting nativities and reading stars to advise on marriages, journeys, lost goods and state affairs.
- Where it applies: Encouraged by governments, unlike necromancy which was punished by death.
- Prophecy after the event
- A prediction credited as fulfilled because it was actually composed once the outcome was known. A vague verse is matched to a known event once that event has already happened.
- Where it applies: Mackay applies it to the Tibertus story specifically. Works only where the wording stays general enough to fit rival candidates.
- Elastic prophecy
- Verses so vague in time and place that some later event will always seem to match them.
- Where it applies: Illustrated by Nostradamus's Centuries and Lilly's hieroglyphics.
- Self-annoyance by omens
- Treating ordinary events as signs, which mostly generates dread rather than comfort.
- Where it applies: Describes the fear-producing habit, not any actual predictive power.
- Interpretation by contraries
- The modern dream rule that each image means its opposite.
- Where it applies: Mackay notes the rule fails in many listed cases.
3 more concepts
- National tinting of superstition
- Each people reads omens from the phenomena its own climate and landscape supply.
- Where it applies: Explains variation in meaning, not variation in the underlying motive.
- Retrospective fitting
- Readers supply the names and dates the prophecy never gave.
- Where it applies: Breaks down if a prophecy is dated and specific in advance.
- Dream-book trade
- Cheap penny-to-sixpence oracle books sold in bulk to poorly educated buyers.
- Where it applies: Evidence is a single informant's sales estimate, not a survey.
Reader’s notes on Fortune-TellingAI reading companion
“How we should pity the arrogance of the worm that crawls at our feet”
Read in context →The worm is the whole argument in miniature — and it works because Mackay makes us look down before realizing someone could be looking down at us. Vanity, not fraud, is named as the root cause.
“The world would as readily believe that they had discovered all secrets, as that they had only discovered one.”
Read in context →A genuinely sharp observation about credulity's economics: believing one impossible thing costs the same as believing ten, so the swindler may as well bundle.
“not because they were astrologers, but because they debased that noble art by taking fees for the recovery of stolen property”
Read in context →Lilly despising the cheap quacks is the funniest thing here — fraud has its own professional dignity, and the hierarchy is always drawn just below oneself.
17 more notes
“Lo! hear what Lilly saith: you are in this month promised victory! Fight it out, brave boys!”
Read in context →Here the superstition stops being funny and turns operational — astrology as morale infrastructure. Men died on the strength of a monthly almanac entry.
“The only thing that detracts from the interest of this remarkable story is the fact, that the prophecy was made after the event.”
Read in context →He lets the tale run four hundred words at full romantic length before pulling the floor out. Cruel, perfectly timed — and it teaches the reader the shape of every such story to come.
“he was suspected of being chiefly instrumental in fulfilling his own prophecy”
Read in context →The one mechanism that actually makes prediction work: not reading fate but arranging it. Mackay notes it and moves on too quickly.
“Know ye not that she must support her mother by her charms?”
Read in context →Kepler's confession — astronomy kept alive by astrology's prostitution. The most honest line in the chapter, and it complicates Mackay's clean contempt: the delusion funded the science that killed it.
“While astrology was encouraged, and its professors courted and rewarded, necromancers were universally condemned to the stake”
Read in context →The division isn't truth versus falsehood — both were nonsense. It's which nonsense flattered the powerful. Gloomy temperaments hanged, cheerful ones pensioned.
“Tyromancy, by cheese.”
Read in context →The list's deadpan accumulation does what no argument could — and logarithmancy sits there proving that each new rigor just becomes fresh material for divination.
“Dreams, say all the wiseacres in Christendom, are to be interpreted by contraries.”
Read in context →A single rule that can never be falsified — mud means fortune, gold means poverty. Mackay hands the system its own rope.
“The rule, however, does not hold good in all cases. It is fortunate to dream of little pigs, but unfortunate to dream of big bullocks.”
Read in context →He lets the exception land one sentence after the rule, deadpan. The pigs do the mocking for him.
“becoming happy or miserable for the day according to their interpretation”
Read in context →This is the real indictment: not false belief but mornings surrendered to a vegetable. The cost is measured in days.
“Daffodils. Any maiden who dreams of daffodils is warned by her good angel to avoid going into a wood with her lover”
Read in context →Suddenly the silly list isn't silly — this is assault wrapped in flower-lore, and the omen is the only warning system a girl was given.
“The cheeks of the peasant girl of England glow with pleasure in the morning after she has dreamed of a rose, while the paysanne of Normandy dreads disappointment”
Read in context →The sharpest argument in the chapter, and purely comparative: the same rose, opposite fates, therefore no fate in the rose at all.
“so much more ingenious are we in tormenting ourselves than in discovering reasons for enjoyment”
Read in context →He shifts from debunking to psychology here. Superstition isn't an error of knowledge but an appetite for dread.
“A general who led an army with credit has been known to feel alarmed at a winding-sheet in the candle”
Read in context →Note he keeps these men anonymous — close enough to shame, vague enough to be unverifiable. Convenient for a debunker.
“there was one case in which he believed that it was really unlucky for thirteen persons to sit down to dinner, and that was when there was only dinner enough for twelve”
Read in context →The joke relocates misfortune from the number to the larder. Best line in the chapter.
“not in the shape of a grim foe, with skeleton-ribs and menacing dart, but of an angel of light”
Read in context →Odd turn: to cure a superstition about death he offers a consoling vision of death. One fiction traded for a nicer one.
“occasion you spit thrice, and form any reasonable wish, it will be gratified within three days”
Read in context →"Reasonable" is the system's escape hatch — any failure becomes proof the wish was unreasonable.
“It is also a sign of good fortune if you inadvertently put on your stocking wrong side out. If you wilfully wear your stocking in this fashion, no good will come of it.”
Read in context →Luck requires sincerity, so it can't be tested. The folk mind guards its magic against experiment better than any theologian.
A reader’s takeAI reading companion
Between protected and punished nonsense, only temperament and flattery mattered
Read as one piece, this chapter moves in a deliberate arc: it opens on a diagnosis, widens into history, then collapses into a list — and the descent is the argument. Mackay begins not with fraud but with vanity, the worm at our feet whose arrogance we pity without noticing that the posture of looking down is exactly what makes us buyable. From there he gives the astrologers their golden age: Lilly and Nostradamus courted by cabinets, pensioned by kings, while necromancers burned. That juxtaposition is the chapter's most unsentimental insight, and I think Mackay sees it more clearly than he says — the line between protected and punished nonsense was never truth, only temperament and flattery. Cheerful prophecy got a salary; gloomy prophecy got the stake. And when Lilly sneers at quacks who take fees for recovering stolen spoons, we get the comedy of fraud defending its own dignity, the hierarchy always drawn one rung beneath oneself.
Two moments puncture the chapter's own confidence, and they are the ones worth carrying away. Kepler's 'she must support her mother by her charms' concedes that astrology bankrolled astronomy — the delusion paid the wages of the science that would eventually kill it, which is messier than contempt allows. And the prophet 'suspected of being chiefly instrumental in fulfilling his own prophecy' names the single mechanism by which prediction actually works: not reading fate but arranging it. Mackay drops both and walks on. I would have had him stop. Likewise his method shows its seams — he lets a romance run four hundred luxurious words before revealing the prophecy was written after the event (cruel, superbly timed, and genuinely instructive: it teaches you the shape of every such story), yet his cautionary generals and trembling statesmen stay conveniently anonymous, close enough to shame, too vague to check.
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The second half's catalogue looks like padding and is in fact the demolition. Tyromancy by cheese; logarithmancy, proving every new rigor becomes fresh divinatory material; dreams read 'by contraries' — a rule no outcome can falsify — immediately undercut by little pigs lucky and big bullocks not. Spit thrice and form any 'reasonable' wish; a stocking worn inside out brings luck only if you didn't mean it. These are not jokes about silliness; they are a demonstration that folk magic is engineered against testing more carefully than any theology. The comparative stroke is the sharpest thing in the chapter and costs him nothing: an English girl glows at dreaming of a rose, a Normandy girl dreads it — same rose, opposite fates, therefore nothing in the rose.
What I want to tell a reader is where the real indictment lands. It is not false belief; it is the accounting. Mornings surrendered to a vegetable, happiness or misery allotted by a tea-leaf, a soldier dying on the strength of an almanac line — 'Fight it out, brave boys' is where superstition stops being funny and becomes infrastructure. Mackay half-admits the appetite is for dread itself: we are more ingenious at tormenting ourselves than at finding reasons for enjoyment. And the daffodil entry, warning a maiden against going into a wood with her lover, shows the ledger's other side — sometimes the omen was the only warning system a girl was issued. Flower-lore doing the work no institution would.
His closing optimism is modest and probably honest: the soothsayers now hide, which is progress of a kind, though the footnoted dream-books still sell in the tens of thousands to servant-girls. But note his final move — to cure the fear of death he offers death as an angel of light rather than a skeleton with a dart. One fiction swapped for a kinder one. It is the chapter's quiet confession: he can expose the machinery of prophecy, and still not leave us standing in nothing.
Read Fortune-Telling with these cards beside each passage.
Open in FeedLitraThe Magnetisers
How does stroking the sword upward foreshadow animal magnetism?
How The Magnetisers unfoldsAI-assisted
The opening: a thesis stated before any history. Mackay begins not with a date or a person but with a proposition — imagination can cure. That premise is placed first deliberately, because it is the lens through which every episode that follows will be read. He then supplies the hinge that turns the premise into a narrative: as alchemy lost its credit, its practitioners did not disband but changed trades, setting up as mineral magnetisers. The claim is one of continuity rather than novelty, and Paracelsus — physician and adept at once — is the figure who carries it across, being the first to credit the magnet with occult curative power. From him the chapter branches immediately into the characteristic products of that credulity: the weapon-salve, Digby's sympathy powder, Greatraks' healing by stroking. The structure here is genealogical: a single root, then offshoots.
The development: a succession assembled, and quietly undercut as it goes. Mackay's middle stretch works by accumulation — Greatraks commanding spirits and vapours out of his patients and drawing Catholic and Protestant alike; Bagnone in Italy producing identical fits with a touch or a relic; Gassner; then the theorists Wirdig and Maxwell, who supply the doctrine. But the accumulation is not neutral. Two counter-moves run beneath it. The first is the observation that the showy part of the cure touched nothing: Fludd anointed the weapon but also washed and dressed the wound every day, and Digby soaked Howell's bloodstained garter in vitriol water while the wound was simply being kept clean. The ceremony collected credit the ordinary nursing had earned. The second counter-move is sharper, because Mackay turns the magnetists' own authority against them: Maxwell, whom they cite in their support, located the secret in binding the patient's imagination — which makes any fluid at the fingertips superfluous. The line of succession is thus built and refuted in the same motion, and it arrives at Mesmer already compromised.
Mesmer as the chapter's centre of gravity. The treatment of Mesmer is the longest and most carefully graded passage, and Mackay's handling of it is deliberately a judgement rather than a verdict. Mesmer begins with Father Hell's metallic plates, whose wonders depended on their wearers' faith; discovers that downward hand passes produce the same effects with no plates at all; and drops the plates. That sequence is itself an experiment, and Mesmer evidently read it correctly, since he then fitted out his Paris rooms with stained glass, mirrors, incense, hidden music and compulsory silence — a man who knew exactly how much the setting mattered. Mackay refuses both partisan extremes and offers, as his own reading, that Mesmer was deluded by his own theory while being perfectly clear-eyed about stagecraft. The baquet is where the chapter's mechanism becomes visible: dim light, enforced silence and a shared tub concentrate the patient's whole attention on what is about to happen, crowding and music amplify the resulting convulsion for hours, and the fit is then counted as proof that a fluid was flowing. The staging manufactures its own evidence.
The turn: Bailly's commission. The structural pivot is the royal commission, and it functions as the point where testimony gives way to controlled observation. Bailly's eyewitness report describes convulsions lasting hours, swollen by music and crowding, falling mostly on women — but the decisive findings are the two reversals: the same effects arose with no passes at all, and no effects followed when the patient did not know a pass was being made. What varied was the patient's knowledge, not the medium. Mackay pairs this with Mesmer's own conduct: formally invited, he excused himself day after day on pretences and sent D'Eslon in his place, having already broken off negotiations with the crown for fear of what the king's physicians would say. The verdict and the evasion reinforce each other.
The close: refutation fails, and the chapter changes its question. What follows the commission is the chapter's most pointed structural stroke — the delusion outgrows its founder rather than dying with his theory. Puysegur magnetises a village elm and has a hundred and thirty sick peasants round it in a single morning; Mainauduc enrols 127 titled pupils in London; three thousand people besiege Loutherbourg's house, and a fanatic's pamphlet follows. The matter is settled not by argument but by trial: at Bath, four of five patients treated with painted wooden tractors report immediate relief, and Perkins's genuine metal ones yield near-identical reports the next day; at the Bristol infirmary a man who cannot lift his hand raises it painlessly within four minutes of sham treatment, timed by stop-watch. Magnetism retreats to Germany and revives with Deleuze's 1813 treatise, whose instructions — forget physics, repel every doubt, do not reason for six weeks — amount to a curriculum in credulity, schooling sincerity rather than fraud. Faria's single spoken word, 'Sleep!', putting hundreds under, completes the demonstration by subtracting the apparatus entirely. Mackay therefore ends where he began, quoting Bailly: whatever else the episode failed to prove, it proved how strong imagination is. The chapter closes by converting a history of error into a record of one genuine finding.
Key claims, with the lines that support them
Magnetic healing was not a fresh discovery but alchemy's direct successor, carried over by the alchemists themselves.
As alchemy lost credit, many of its practitioners simply switched trades and set up as magnetisers; Paracelsus, both physician and adept, was the first to credit the magnet with occult curative power, and the author traces an unbroken succession from him down to Mesmer.
“Numbers of them, forsaking their old pursuits, made themselves magnetisers.”
The MagnetisersRead in context →
Where magnetic remedies did seem to work, the healing came from the sound ordinary care given alongside the ritual.
Fludd's weapon-salve cases turned out well because he never neglected to wash and dress the wound — the author notes that surgeons of his own day do exactly the same thing, minus the anointing. Digby likewise dipped Howell's bloodstained garter in vitriol water and Howell declared his pain gone, while the wound itself was merely being kept clean; the story, though, comes from Digby telling it to an admiring audience.
“for surgeons at this moment follow exactly the same method, except anointing the weapon!”
The MagnetisersRead in context →
Building on that, the healers' effects came from the patient's belief and desire, not from any agent passing out of the operator.
Greatraks ordered water-spirits and vapours out of his patients and drew Catholics and Protestants alike, all arriving convinced the power was real; in Italy Bagnone brought on identical fits with a touch or a relic, which the author reports without independent confirmation. Turning the magnetists' own authority against them, the author points out that Maxwell — whom they cite in support — located the secret in binding the patient's imagination, which makes the fluid at the fingertips superfluous.
“Evremond thus sums up the effect he produced on the popular mind: “So great was the confidence in him, that the blind fancied they saw the light which they did not see—the deaf imagined that they heard—the lame that they walked straight, and the paralytic that they had recovered the use of their limbs.”
The MagnetisersRead in context →
3 more claims
Mesmer is best read not as a plain cheat but as a man deluded by his own theory, who nevertheless knew exactly how much the setting mattered.
He began with Father Hell's metallic plates, whose wonders depended on the wearers' faith, then found he could produce the same effects with downward hand passes and no plates at all — and dropped them. Knowing as well as anyone how imagination works, he fitted out his Paris rooms with stained glass, mirrors, incense, hidden music and compulsory silence; the author offers the self-delusion reading as his own judgement between two partisan extremes.
“That the writer of these pages considers him in the light of a man who, deluding himself, was the means of deluding others, may be inferred from his finding a place in these volumes, and figuring among the Flamels, the Agrippas, the Borris, the Böhmens, and the Cagliostros.”
The MagnetisersRead in context →
The royal commission concluded that imagination, not a magnetic fluid, produced everything observed — and Mesmer avoided every test that physicians would judge.
Bailly's eyewitness report describes convulsions lasting hours, swollen by music and crowding and falling mostly on women; the experiments showed the same effects arising with no passes at all, and no effects when the patient did not know a pass was being made. Invited formally before the body, Mesmer excused himself day after day on pretences — he had earlier broken off negotiations with the crown for fear of the king's physicians' verdict — and left D'Eslon to attend in his place.
“After detailing the various experiments made, and their results, they came to the conclusion that the only proof advanced in support of animal magnetism was the effects it produced on the human body—that those effects could be produced without passes or other magnetic manipulations—that all these manipulations and passes and ceremonies never produce any effect at all if employed without the patient’s knowledge;”
The MagnetisersRead in context →
Refutation did not kill the delusion — imitators carried it further than its founder — and its only durable value is as a recorded experiment on the force of imagination.
After the verdict, Puysegur magnetised a village elm and had more than a hundred and thirty sick peasants round it in one morning; in England Mainauduc enrolled 127 titled and respectable pupils and three thousand people besieged Loutherbourg's house. The matter was settled only by a controlled trial: at Bath, four of five patients treated with painted wooden tractors reported immediate relief, and the genuine metal ones produced near-identical reports the next day, while at the Bristol infirmary a man who could not lift his hand raised it painlessly within four minutes of sham treatment timed by stop-watch. Faria later put hundreds to sleep with nothing but the spoken word 'Sleep!', which is why the author ends by quoting Bailly: the episode at least proved how strong imagination is.
“Imitators sprang up in France, Germany, and England, more extravagant than their master, and claiming powers for the new science which its founder had never dreamt of.”
The MagnetisersRead in context →
How it works
The 3 mechanisms the chapter’s argument runs on.
Mechanism 1
Showy ritual, ordinary nursing
The magical part of the treatment — anointing the weapon, soaking a bloody garter in vitriol water — touched nothing in the patient's body, but the same practitioners also washed and bandaged the wound every day. The injury then healed on its normal course, and the ceremony collected the credit.
Mechanism 2
Belief alone moves the body
In a nervous or hysterical patient, confident expectation produces real sensations — pain, fits, sudden ease — so a healer who commands trust appears to cure while transmitting nothing at all. Doubters stay quiet, since arguing with an admiring crowd is futile, which makes the run of successes look unanimous.
Mechanism 3
The staged crisis manufactures its own proof
Dim stained glass, mirrors, incense, unseen harp music, enforced silence and the shared tub concentrate a patient's whole attention on what is about to happen. Crowding and music then amplify the resulting convulsion, often for hours, and the fit is counted as evidence that a fluid was flowing.
Common misreadings
The patients really did feel better, so some physical influence must have passed from the metal or the magnetiser's hands.
The relief was genuine as experience but worthless as evidence about the medium: painted wooden copies eased the very same complaints as Perkins's magnetised steel, and in the commission's trials the effects disappeared whenever the patient was not aware of being treated. What varied was the patient's knowledge and belief, not the material.
“Four out of the five patients said their pains were immediately relieved; and three of them said they were not only relieved but very much benefited.”
The MagnetisersRead in context →
Once imagination is identified as the cause, everyone involved was running a knowing swindle.
The author places Mesmer between the partisan extremes and reads him as a man taken in by his own system, and the staging shows the setting manufactured the fits without showing the participants were insincere. The training made sincerity easy: Deleuze told beginners to forget physics, repel every doubt and never reason for six weeks, which schools the operator in credulity rather than fraud.
“That the writer of these pages considers him in the light of a man who, deluding himself, was the means of deluding others, may be inferred from his finding a place in these volumes, and figuring among the Flamels, the Agrippas, the Borris, the Böhmens, and the Cagliostros.”
The MagnetisersRead in context →
Key concepts in The Magnetisers
- Power of imagination in cures
- A patient's faith alone can produce symptoms or relief, making useless remedies look effective.
- Where it applies: Works on nervous and hypochondriacal complaints, not on organic causes such as Lady Conway's headache.
- Mineral magnetism
- The doctrine that magnets hold occult healing power, begun by Paracelsus and running on to Mesmer.
- Where it applies: Precedes animal magnetism, where the operator's own hand replaces the mineral.
- Weapon-salve
- Anointing the weapon rather than the wound, while the wound got ordinary cleaning and bandaging.
- Where it applies: Excluded wounds reaching heart, brain, or arteries.
- Power of imagination over the body
- Belief alone can produce or relieve symptoms, so a healer who commands confidence seems to cure.
- Where it applies: Explains felt relief and convulsions, not verified organic cures like Mademoiselle Paradis's blindness.
- Timid public opinion
- Doubters stay silent because contradicting an admiring crowd is useless, so the delusion looks unanimous.
- Where it applies: Describes social silence, not the sincerity of the believers themselves.
- Universal magnetic fluid
- Mesmer's claimed subtle fluid filling the universe and all bodies, transferable by will or fingertips.
- Where it applies: Mackay notes it contradicts Maxwell's purely imaginative account that magnetists cite in support.
7 more concepts
- Staged magnetic crisis
- The baquet, dim light, music, touch and silence engineered the convulsive fit that counted as proof.
- Where it applies: Shows the setting manufactured the effect; it does not prove participants were insincere.
- Animal magnetism
- A supposed universal fluid a magnetiser channels into patients to cure disease.
- Where it applies: Its claimed effects vanished when manipulations were done without the patient's knowledge.
- Magnetic somnambulism
- A sleep-like crisis in which the patient supposedly gains enlarged, clairvoyant intelligence.
- Where it applies: Reported only by believing observers; sleepers remembered nothing afterwards.
- Popular credulity
- The public appetite that keeps a discredited doctrine alive and profitable.
- Where it applies: Operates after expert refutation, not before it.
- Fictitious tractors
- Painted wooden copies of Perkins's magnetised steel plates, used as a control to test whether the metal mattered.
- Where it applies: Tests the curative medium only; it does not deny that patients truly felt relief.
- Imagination as cause and cure
- The patient's belief and expectation, not the device, producing both symptoms and relief.
- Where it applies: Works mainly on the weak, believing, and nervous; strong and incredulous subjects resist.
- Unfalsifiable magnetic conditions
- Rules that excuse every failure: only believers can be magnetised, and a single sceptic spoils the fluid.
- Where it applies: A rhetorical defence, not a physical claim; it makes the doctrine untestable.
Reader’s notes on The MagnetisersAI reading companion
“a pill made of bread, if taken with sufficient faith, will operate a cure better than all the drugs in the pharmacopœia”
Read in context →Mackay opens by handing us the explanation before the evidence — the whole chapter is pre-debunked. Reading becomes watching him collect specimens, not solve a puzzle.
“so well understood now, but which were then supposed to be the work of the Devil”
Read in context →That smug "now" is the chapter's most dated phrase. Hysteria was his era's bread pill — a confident name for what nobody understood.
“as they increase, the disease will diminish; and when they have arrived at their full growth, it will disappear altogether”
Read in context →Beautiful poetic logic — illness as something transplantable, growable elsewhere. No wonder it persuaded; it's a better story than medicine was.
17 more notes
“for surgeons at this moment follow exactly the same method, except anointing the weapon!”
Read in context →The sharpest line so far, and it cuts both ways: the quackery worked because it was smuggling real hygiene in under the ritual. The absurd part was the only inert part.
“The Squeezing of Parson Foster’s Spunge”
Read in context →Mackay lets the title run on for three clauses and says nothing — the funniest thing he does all chapter is simply quote accurately.
“Hagase el milagro y hagalo Mahoma—Let the miracle be done, though Mahomet do it”
Read in context →Howell names the mechanism himself. The patient doesn't need to believe in the method, only to suspend the question — and that suspension is the drug.
“servant came running, and saying that his master felt as much burning as ever he had done”
Read in context →Digby's story is too well-engineered: dry the garter, pain returns; dip it, relief. He's built a falsifiable test and passed it — which means he'd stumbled on suggestion's dose-response without knowing it.
“his wife, who very candidly told him that he was a fool”
Read in context →The one sane voice in the chapter gets a half-sentence. Mackay enjoys her too much to develop her.
“It is evident from this that the woman’s complaint was nothing but hysteria”
Read in context →"Nothing but" — he dismisses her the way Greatraks dismissed her, just with a fashionable vocabulary. Same gesture, different century.
“Those who saw through the delusion kept their opinion to themselves, knowing how useless it was to declare their disbelief”
Read in context →Here the chapter stops being about magnetism. The real delusion isn't belief — it's the silence of those who don't believe. That's the mechanism that makes a crowd.
“life was preserved by magnetism; death was the consequence of magnetism!”
Read in context →A theory that explains both life and death explains nothing. Mackay's exclamation mark does the whole refutation — he lets the sentence hang itself.
“Here, in fact, lies the whole secret of magnetism, and all delusions of a similar kind”
Read in context →Sharp move: he takes the magnetists' own star witness and turns him into the prosecution's. Maxwell admitted it was imagination all along.
“what becomes of the universal fluid pervading all nature”
Read in context →The fatal fork — either it's suggestion or it's fluid, and you can't bank the credit of both.
“succeeded in battering a hole in a stone wall at the twenty-fifth stroke”
Read in context →The one genuinely controlled experiment in the whole passage, and it's a man hitting a wall to calibrate how hard he'd hit a woman. Grotesque and oddly rigorous.
“Like the French philosopher, he would not allow facts to interfere with his theory.”
Read in context →And the pivot from self-delusion to slander: the blind girl must be faking sight-lessness. The theory now requires his patient to be a conspirator.
“Orange-blossoms scented all the air of his corridors”
Read in context →Mackay spends more prose on the furnishings than on the doctrine — rightly. The stained glass and hidden soprano are the active ingredient.
“using gentle pressure upon the breasts of the ladies”
Read in context →Here the account stops being comic. Handsome young men, enforced silence, knees pressed together — the clinic is built to produce exactly what it then measures.
“the object of the inquiry should be, not how these effects were produced”
Read in context →He tries to fence off the only question that matters. A man confident in his fluid would welcome the mechanism test.
“four or five hundred thousand francs, applied to a good purpose, are of no account”
Read in context →The letter to the queen undoes him better than any commission could: the selfless benefactor of mankind naming his price, and threatening to take humanity's salvation elsewhere.
“absented himself from day to day, upon one pretence or another”
Read in context →Franklin and Lavoisier in the room and the discoverer won't come. D'Eslon's honesty here is the quiet tragedy — he showed up because he actually believed.
A reader’s takeAI reading companion
Imagination explains the cures, fluid is unemployed, but practitioners want both
Mackay structures this chapter as a confession rather than an investigation: he hands us the bread pill in the opening paragraph, and everything that follows — Paracelsus's cure-all magnet, the weapon-salve, Digby's garter, Greatraks's strokes, Gassner's exorcisms, Mesmer's baquet, Perkins's tractors, Faria's single barked 'Sleep!' — arrives as a specimen rather than a mystery. The pleasure of reading it is watching one explanation absorb two centuries of costumes. Mackay's best effects are curatorial: he quotes the three-clause pamphlet titles straight and lets them collapse; he sets 'life was preserved by magnetism; death was the consequence of magnetism' beside an exclamation mark and needs no refutation; he turns Maxwell, the magnetists' own authority, into the prosecution's witness by simply reprinting the man's admission that imagination did the work.
The fork he exposes is fatal and never answered by anyone in the chapter: if imagination explains the cures, the universal fluid is unemployed, and no practitioner will bank only one of those credits. Three things I saw through that Mackay does not quite say himself. First, the quackery often smuggled something real inside the ritual — his aside that surgeons now dress the wound and leave it alone, 'except anointing the weapon,' concedes that the absurd element was the inert element, and Digby's dry-garter/wet-garter test accidentally demonstrated a dose-response in suggestion. Second, the clinics were engineered to manufacture their own evidence: orange blossom, stained glass, hidden soprano, enforced silence, handsome young assistants with their hands on the patients' bodies.
Continue reading
Mackay spends more ink on the furnishings than the doctrine, and he is right to — the furnishings were the active ingredient, and the setting stops being comic the moment you notice who was being touched and told not to speak. Third, and most durable, is his line about those who saw through it keeping quiet because dissent was useless. That is the real subject. Belief is not the engine of a delusion; the silence of the unconvinced is. Where the chapter dates itself is in its own confidence. 'It is evident the woman's complaint was nothing but hysteria' repeats Greatraks's gesture in a fashionable vocabulary: a name deployed as if it were an understanding, a bread pill for the author's own century.
And when a sane wife tells her husband he is a fool, she gets half a sentence — Mackay enjoys her more than he uses her. My sharpest judgement concerns Mesmer, and it is not that he was a fraud about the fluid. It is the sequence: he insists the inquiry must ask whether the effects are real and not how they are produced (a man confident in his fluid would welcome the mechanism test); he offers the crown his secret for a price while declaring that four or five hundred thousand francs are nothing to a benefactor of mankind; he decides a blind girl must be faking her blindness rather than revise his theory; and then, with Franklin, Lavoisier and Bailly assembled, he absents himself day after day on one pretence and another.
The commission's verdict is almost superfluous beside that absence. D'Eslon, who turned up and submitted, is the chapter's quiet tragedy: honesty is what credulity costs its sincere practitioners. What I want the reader to take is not a laugh at the past. Haygarth's wooden tractors are the chapter's permanent instrument — build the sham, keep the ceremony, and watch the cures arrive anyway. The question to carry forward is never 'did patients improve?' but 'what in this did the improving, and would it still work if the explanation were false?' Mackay's closing credit to imagination's strength is sincere, and it is the right note: the faculty that filled a Paris corridor with convulsions is the same one that heals, and it does not announce which it is doing.
We have not escaped it; we have renamed it, which is how every generation in this chapter believed it had escaped too.
Read The Magnetisers with these cards beside each passage.
Open in FeedLitraInfluence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and Beard
Why did a private dream outperform organized preaching?
How Influence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and Beard unfoldsAI-assisted
This chapter is Mackay in miniature-essay mode: he takes a single trivial object — the hair on a man's head and chin — and shows that popes, kings, and crowds have treated it as a matter of salvation and state.
The opening establishes the premise with a text and an irony. St. Paul's line that "long hair was a shame unto a man" becomes, Mackay says, the "pretext for many singular enactments" civil and ecclesiastical, so that hair and beard were "state questions in France and England" from the coming of Christianity to the fifteenth century. He then widens backward in time before narrowing: Alexander shaving his army so the enemy had no handle to grip, set against the North American warriors who cultivate a "chivalrous lock" precisely so the scalper has something to catch. Among the Franks, long curled hair was the royal monopoly — Gregory of Tours is his authority — until nobles, then even serfs, refused the distinction and the hierarchy of hairstyles collapsed into fashion.
The development is the long English and French core, built as a sequence of failed coercions. The Normans came to Hastings so closely shaven that Harold's spies took them for priests; the conquered English grew their hair to look as little as possible like their masters. The clergy answered with excommunication for the long-haired, living and dead, and Mackay gives the comic exhibit of St. Wulstan whipping a knife from his pocket to shear anyone who knelt for a blessing, then telling him to go finish the job or go to hell. His governing maxim arrives here — "fashion, which at times it is possible to move with a wisp, stands firm against a lever" — and the Henry I. episode proves it: the chaplain Serlo preaches the court to tears and clips the king's own hair with pocket scissors, but within six months the courtiers decide the "clerical Delilah" has shorn their strength and relapse. Anselm's pertinacity only makes the king glad to leave Canterbury vacant five years. What finally works is not authority but accident: a fashionable knight dreams the devil is choking him with his own hair, wakes with a mouthful of it, crops himself that night, and the court follows — "the dream of a dandy having proved more efficacious than the entreaties of a saint" — and even that lasts scarcely a year. Henry, haunted by bishops brandishing pastoral staves at his bedside, ignores his physician's advice and submits only after nearly drowning at sea.
The turn outward moves from hair to beards and from clergy to secular power. France supplies the chapter's one genuinely large consequence: Louis VII. crops himself monkishly, Eleanor of Guienne tires of her shaven and ascetic husband, the divorce carries Guienne and Poitou to Henry II. of England, and from a haircut descend centuries of Anglo-French war. Beards, Mackay notes, the Church largely left to fashion — hence the Scots' epigram nailed to a London church door in 1327, "Long beards heartlesse... Make England thriftlesse"; hence a beardless Charles V. instantly debearding his courtiers, who sigh "we have no longer souls since we have lost our beards"; hence France abandoning beards merely because Henry IV.'s successor was too young for one. The Roundhead–Cavalier split closes the pattern in epigram: "the more abundant the hair, the more scant the faith."
The climax and close. Peter the Great in 1705 is the "most extraordinary, not only for its daring, but for its success" — and his success is precisely the proof of Mackay's thesis about method. Ignorant of history and therefore unafraid, Peter ordered all ranks shaven and taxed the obstinate a hundred roubles, priests and serfs a copeck at the city gate, issuing the copper "borodováia" receipt with its nose, mouth, and bushy beard. Wiser than the popes, he threatened not damnation but cash — and the memory of the Strelitzes meant men thought it cheaper to lose a beard than a head. From there Mackay arrives at his own day with a shrug: the Vatican has given up, men may grow "hairy as bears," and "folly has taken a new start, and cultivates the moustache." The last two instances are contemporary and deliberately slight — Parisian and Brussels shopkeepers sprouting real and mock moustaches after 1830, with the Dutch jeering that they gathered enough from shaved Belgian lips to stuff hospital mattresses; and the King of Bavaria's 1838 edict against civilian moustaches, which vanished "like leaves from the trees in autumn" with not one arrest. The final jab is a pun on the royal poet's "licences," hoping he will not next order his subjects to shave their heads, "nothing but that is wanting to complete their degradation" — ending the chapter where it began, on the absurdity of power legislating hair, but now with the laugh pointed at a living king rather than a medieval saint.
Key claims, with the lines that support them
Centuries of church thunder against long hair achieved almost nothing.
The author stacks failures: a late-eleventh-century papal decree excommunicating the long-haired and refusing them prayers after death; Bishop Wulstan slicing off a handful of hair with a pocket knife and threatening hell; Anselm republishing the excommunication in vain because the court itself had taken to curls; Serlo's sermon that made Henry I and his nobles weep and submit to the scissors, after which they were as great sinners as ever within six months. Partial exceptions are admitted — Louis VII cropped himself like a monk, and the crusades emptied Europe of the young gallants, making the stay-at-home burghers easier to convince.
“Still the cause had other advocates, and every pulpit in the land resounded with anathemas against that disobedient and long-haired generation. But all was of no avail.”
Influence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and BeardRead in context →
What preaching could not do, a fashionable man's example did — though only for a season.
Following directly from the failure of the pulpit, the author's turning point is trivial: a court knight dreamt the devil was choking him with his own hair, woke with hair in his mouth, and cropped it that night; because he led the fashion, imitation spread and men looked as decent as Wulstan could have wished. The reform lasted scarcely a year before courtiers again competed with women in long hair, and the king himself only relented after nearly drowning at sea.
“Still the cause had other advocates, and every pulpit in the land resounded with anathemas against that disobedient and long-haired generation. But all was of no avail.”
Influence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and BeardRead in context →
Hair and beards changed mainly as badges of nation, party and politics, not as matters of taste or doctrine.
Long curled hair was the exclusive mark of Clovis's royal line, and later kings cropped themselves to stay distinct once serfs grew their locks; Harold's spies reported the Normans looked like priests because they shaved face and lips; subjugated Englishmen grew their hair to look unlike their shaven masters, and Fitz-osbert, beard to his waist, revived long hair to separate Saxons from Normans. The same logic runs to Roundheads and Cavaliers, where a man's locks announced his creed, and to 1830, when Paris and Brussels shopkeepers sprouted real or false moustaches — Louvain patriots shaving clean the moment Dutch troops had the upper hand.
“Still the cause had other advocates, and every pulpit in the land resounded with anathemas against that disobedient and long-haired generation. But all was of no avail.”
Influence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and BeardRead in context →
2 more claims
Secular power — even just the monarch's own face — redirected fashion far more easily than the Church's threats.
Read against the failed anathemas, the author's counter-cases need no sermon at all: Charles V came to the Spanish throne beardless, and courtiers instantly went beardless too, leaving only a few old men to die bearded; after Henry IV's death the French beard fell into disrepute simply because the new king was too young to grow one, with Sully among the few who refused to shave. Where an order was issued, obedience was immediate: Bavaria's 1838 edict against civilian moustaches had them vanish like autumn leaves, with not one arrest.
“Still the cause had other advocates, and every pulpit in the land resounded with anathemas against that disobedient and long-haired generation. But all was of no avail.”
Influence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and BeardRead in context →
Peter the Great's shaving decree succeeded because it taxed and frightened rather than condemned.
A deadline let the first revulsion pass, then a hundred-rouble charge fell on anyone keeping a beard, with priests and serfs paying a copeck at each city gate and receiving the copper 'borodováia' coin as proof, which had to be produced on entering a town; refusers went to prison. Discontent was wide, but the recent destruction of the Strelitzes meant men judged it wiser to lose a beard than a head. The author's point is comparative: wiser than earlier popes, Peter demanded hard cash instead of eternal damnation, and collected a sizeable revenue for years.
“But among all the instances of the interference of governments with men’s hair, the most extraordinary, not only for its daring, but for its success, is that of Peter the Great, in 1705.”
Influence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and BeardRead in context →
How it works
The 3 mechanisms the chapter’s argument runs on.
Mechanism 1
Grooming as a group badge
Once an authority or a rival group reads hair length as allegiance, cutting it means surrendering identity, so pressure backfires: the conquered English let their hair grow precisely because their Norman masters were cropped, and Russians clung to beards because foreigners they hated had abandoned them.
Mechanism 2
Custom yields to nudges, not levers
The author's rule is that fashion can be moved with a wisp yet stands firm against a lever. Damnation and outlawry only hardened the long-haired, while one admired courtier's cropped head was copied at once — pressure from a peer works where force from above does not.
Mechanism 3
Price it instead of damning it
Peter the Great turned disobedience from a point of honour into a purchase: a fixed sum, a receipt coin, prison for refusers. Because the penalty was collectible and backed by a ruler known to kill, each man calculated privately rather than resisting as a wronged believer.
Common misreadings
The Russian case proves that firm enough state coercion can always override a deep-rooted custom.
The chapter presents Peter as the extraordinary exception, and names the conditions that made him exceptional: a penalty the state could actually collect and verify, prison for refusers, and the fresh memory of the Strelitzes' fate, so that thousands who wanted to revolt lacked the nerve. Where coercion lacked those teeth — papal excommunication, outlawry, episcopal knives and scissors — it failed for centuries, and the Bavarian edict that was obeyed at once concerned a decoration nobody treated as sacred. The author's own reading is that later rulers learned to persuade rather than force.
“But among all the instances of the interference of governments with men’s hair, the most extraordinary, not only for its daring, but for its success, is that of Peter the Great, in 1705.”
Influence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and BeardRead in context →
The Church fought beards and long head hair with the same zeal, so clerical pressure explains beard fashions too.
The author draws a line between the two: the Church never showed itself as great an enemy to the beard as to long hair, generally letting fashion do as it pleased with chin and upper lip. That is why beard length swings freely in the narrative — short under Richard I, long enough a century later to earn the Scots' 1327 jibe about 'long beards heartlesse' pinned to a London church door, then abolished by a beardless emperor's example rather than any decree.
“Still the cause had other advocates, and every pulpit in the land resounded with anathemas against that disobedient and long-haired generation. But all was of no avail.”
Influence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and BeardRead in context →
Key concepts in Influence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and Beard
- Hair as political symbol
- Length or cut of hair standing for rank, nation, creed or party rather than mere taste.
- Where it applies: Applies where an authority or rival group reads grooming as allegiance; not to purely private taste.
- Taxing instead of damning
- Compelling conformity through a cash penalty rather than spiritual threats.
- Where it applies: Works where the state can collect and punish; Peter also had the terror of the Strelitzes behind him.
- Fashion's resistance to force
- Custom bends to light social nudges but resists heavy coercion.
- Where it applies: Breaks down under a despot able to tax or kill, as in Russia.
0 more concepts
Reader’s notes on Influence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and BeardAI reading companion
“it is held a point of honour to allow one “chivalrous lock” to grow”
Read in context →Mackay sets Alexander's grim practicality against this, and the Indians come off better — a rare moment where he lets the "savage" hold the moral high ground. The word "chivalrous" does the whole job.
“He continually carried a small knife in his pocket”
Read in context →A bishop ambushing kneeling worshippers with scissors. The detail that condemns it is that he waited for them to kneel — the posture of trust turned into an opportunity.
“fashion, which at times it is possible to move with a wisp, stands firm against a lever”
Read in context →The best sentence in the chapter, and the thesis of the whole book in miniature: collective habit yields to nothing proportionate to the force applied.
10 more notes
“men preferred to run the risk of damnation to parting with the superfluity of their hair”
Read in context →If eternal fire genuinely loses to a hairstyle, either the belief was shallower than professed or vanity is deeper than theology. Mackay enjoys the joke without pressing the harder question.
“the clerical Delilah had shorn them of their strength”
Read in context →Six months of penitence is about right for a conversion produced by weeping in public. Note the inversion: the priest is Delilah, the courtiers Samson — the Church cast as seductress.
“the dream of a dandy having proved more efficacious than the entreaties of a saint”
Read in context →The real mechanism isn't the dream, it's that the dreamer was "the acknowledged leader of the fashion." Influence, not revelation. The clergy only borrowed a trendsetter.
“the kings of France lost the rich provinces of Guienne and Poitou”
Read in context →A haircut to centuries of war in four sentences. Delicious, and almost certainly false — Eleanor's divorce had dynastic causes that a monkish trim merely decorates.
“Desde que no hay barba, no hay mas alma.”
Read in context →The oldest complaint there is, in Spanish: the young have no souls because they don't look like us. Also quietly funny that virility was being tracked by whoever happened to sit the throne.
“The more abundant the hair, the more scant the faith”
Read in context →The neat chiasmus flatters both sides into the same error — each party reading character off a scalp. He's describing a semiotics so cheap it needs no evidence.
“he did not threaten them with eternal damnation, but made them pay in hard cash”
Read in context →This is the chapter's sharpest insight and Mackay half-buries it: a tax beats an anathema because it prices the custom instead of forbidding it. Peter let people keep their beards and still won.
“Those who were refractory, and refused to pay the tax, were thrown into prison”
Read in context →So much for persuasion by price. The beard token worked because the Strelitzes had been slaughtered — Mackay admits it earlier, then lets "hard cash" sound almost genteel.
“Folly has taken a new start, and cultivates the moustache.”
Read in context →He's spent the chapter laughing at men who read morality off hair — and here assigns "folly" to a grooming choice himself. The satirist steps unknowingly into his own pillory.
“not one person was arrested”
Read in context →Reported as comic obedience, but it's the most chilling line here: the decree worked perfectly. The crowd that defied popes for four centuries folded to a Bavarian police notice overnight.
A reader’s takeAI reading companion
Centuries of law failed to change hair, fashion did overnight
A chapter that is funnier and slyer than its subject deserves, and whose real argument is almost accidental: coercion fails where accident and vanity succeed. Mackay lines up popes, archbishops, and kings who spent centuries legislating hair length and achieved nothing, then sets beside them a dandy's nightmare that reformed a whole court in a night, and Peter the Great's beard tax that worked because it asked for roubles rather than repentance. The lesson he half-states — fashion moves with a wisp and resists a lever — is sharper sociology than the moralizing frame around it. But the frame keeps reasserting itself.
He cannot describe hair without calling it folly, so the Belgians with their mock moustaches and the Bavarians who shaved on command are both filed as delusion, when the second case is really about docility and the first about belonging. And his causal chains are gleefully unsound: Louis VII's monkish crop does not lose Guienne, however much one wishes it did. What survives is the anthropological insight he never quite claims — that a man's hair has always been a statement of allegiance (Saxon against Norman, Roundhead against Cavalier, Russian against foreigner), which is precisely why authority keeps reaching for the scissors, and precisely why it keeps losing.
Read Influence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and Beard with these cards beside each passage.
Open in FeedLitraThe Crusades
How does Mackay's verdict on crusading enthusiasm compare with his treatment of financial manias?
How The Crusades unfoldsAI-assisted
Mackay begins not with a narrative but with a thesis about measurement. Having listed the ordinary engines of popular madness separately — love of gain, the craving for excitement, imitation, politics, religion — he argues that the Crusades are history's clearest gauge of enthusiasm precisely because all of them pushed the same way at once. That framing is doing structural work: it tells the reader in advance that what follows is not a story about faith but about convergence. He then slows down and lays a two-century fuse: pilgrimage traffic to Palestine, the taxes levied on it, millennial panic, and Turkish persecution of travellers. The persecution is where his first mechanism surfaces, and it is counterintuitive by design. Since merit was reckoned by cost, rough handling on the road advertised a fuller pardon rather than a worse journey, so returning pilgrims' tales of insult recruited. By the time Peter the Hermit and Urban II reach Clermont, the chapter has already explained why they could be heard.
2. Development: ignition and the anatomy of the rush
Clermont supplies the cry — Dieu le veult — and Mackay immediately itemises what was actually on offer: Palestine as a land of milk and honey to be divided among the takers, pardon for sin, and a papal edict erasing the liabilities of debtors and outlaws. To this he adds social coercion (the distaff or knitting-needle pressed on a hesitating neighbour) and then lets the market testify: land and houses at a quarter value, seven sheep for five deniers, weapons soaring, the poor selling up without reckoning their means. Alongside this runs his second mechanism, expectation manufacturing its own evidence — a bright aurora read as God's armies, a monk fed by offerings for a cross he had cut into his own forehead and credited to an angel. The development then tests the whole apparatus against reality, and it fails: Walter's 25,000 reduced to 3,000, Gottschalk's 100,000 destroyed in Hungary, the Jew-killing bands routed at Mersburg by an unaccountable panic after their own assault had already succeeded. Not one swarm reached Palestine. Mackay's inference is placed where the contrast bites hardest — Kilij Aslaun advanced expecting the same rabble and met the most experienced captains in Europe instead. Leadership, not zeal, decided survival.
3. Antioch: the chapter's demonstration piece
The Antioch sequence is where the argument is proved rather than asserted, and it is the chapter's centre of gravity. Mackay first strips the army of every material explanation for its success: 300,000 reduced to 60,000 by famine and plague, abundance squandered so fast that hunger began within ten days (most of each carcass thrown away out of daintiness), barely two hundred mounted knights, the infantry sick and emaciated. The city itself fell by a bribed Armenian's surrendered tower, not by valour. Then belief is shown being built: two deserters return with apparitions and are believed instantly; twelve men dig from sunrise to dusk and find nothing until the priest who announced the vision drops into the pit himself and the lance-point appears. The starving army wins. And the same credulity promptly runs in reverse against the enemy, when drifting white smoke taken for mounted saints scatters seventy thousand — fear, Mackay notes, travels faster than enthusiasm. The sequence closes on its own ironies: the chiefs quarrel over the spoils, Peter Barthelemy dies in the fiery ordeal (worn out, by Mackay's third mechanism, not by scepticism but by his own accumulating inconsistencies), and the host weeps at the sight of Jerusalem before storming it without quarter.
4. The turn: changed ideas, not exhaustion
Jerusalem's fall is the hinge, and Mackay marks it explicitly: the frenzy subsides, the Latin kingdoms weaken, the Saracens unite. Here he refuses the obvious explanation and endorses Guizot's instead — men of the thirteenth century could not be wearied by expeditions their great-grandfathers had made. What changed was belief and circumstance: strengthened communes, settled order and comfort, manners softened by chivalry and the Trouvères, and knights marrying Eastern wives (Baldwin first among them) until hatred of the Saracen cooled, so that the fiercest later fighting fell to fresh European levies. The consequence is structural, not merely chronological: each successive crusade must be carried by a narrower class. St. Bernard appeals to reason and raises Louis VII and Conrad, whose armies Greek treachery wrecks in Cappadocia; Damascus then collapses when twenty claimants quarrel over a principality in a city not yet taken, abandon the weak half-demolished wall, and let it be refortified. By the third expedition the epidemic is extinct — nations watch their princes arm with cold indifference, minstrels and troubadours recruit for prowess and ladies' favour, and Saladin's tithe is resented.
5. The long descent: defeats that are self-inflicted
From here the chapter becomes a catalogue with a single explanation. Richard refortifies Acre, beats Saladin near Azotus, opens the road to Jerusalem — and the army sits at Jaffa through rival jealousy until Saladin can fight again. In Egypt, Austria's duke takes Damietta's key tower and spends a superb opening, created by Camhel's revolt, on revelry and infighting until both brothers besiege the besiegers. The pattern Mackay has established at Antioch and Damascus is simply repeated: waste, dependence on treachery, and leaders quarrelling over unwon prizes. Saracen strength is not the cause. Then the Korasmin sack of Jerusalem and the slaughter of the knights at Jaffa leave only kings in the field: Louis IX, moved by a fever dream and unsupported by any popular zeal, wins at Damietta, collapses at Massoura, is ransomed, and dies at Carthage; Edward, heir to the English throne, can raise fifteen hundred men and reaches only Nazareth. The measure of the change is a minstrel's dialogue from Louis's day that gives the better arguments to the man who stays home.
6. Close: the ledger
The ending is deliberately unheroic. A ten-year truce, broken by the Christians; Margat, Tripoli and at last Acre lost; clerical appeals falling flat because the mania has spent itself — the epidemic simply has no fuel left. Mackay then steps back out of narrative into accounting, as he did at the start, and tallies the cost in lives and treasure. But the final note is a concession against his own grain: the ruinous enterprise produced real gains nobody intended — the sort of unlooked-for benefit that neither the preachers nor the pilgrims could have claimed credit for. The chapter thus closes where it opened, treating the whole affair as a quantity to be measured rather than a cause to be judged.
Key claims, with the lines that support them
The Crusades are history's clearest measure of how far popular enthusiasm can be driven, because every ordinary motive for mass excitement pushed in the same direction at once.
The author opens this chapter by listing love of gain, the craving for excitement, imitation, politics and religion as separate causes of popular madness, then argues that in this case all of them converged, which is why the movement went further than any comparable episode.
“Every one of these causes influenced the Crusades, and conspired to render them the most extraordinary instance upon record of the extent to which popular enthusiasm can be carried.”
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The rush eastward was powered by material and social incentives as much as by faith.
Urban's sermon offered Palestine as a land of milk and honey to be divided among the takers, alongside pardon; the papal edict wiped out debtors' and outlaws' liabilities; and hesitators were handed a distaff or knitting-needle by neighbours as a public insult. The author adds the economy's own verdict: land and houses went for a quarter of their value and seven sheep sold for five deniers while weapons soared, and an eyewitness observer reports the poor selling up without even reckoning their means.
“That land, he promised, should be divided among them. Moreover, they should have full pardon for all their offences, either against God or man.”
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Leadership, not zeal, decided who survived the journey — which is why the unled popular hordes were destroyed and the princes' armies were not.
Walter's band lost 22,000 of 25,000 near Nice and he himself died of seven wounds; at Mersburg the crowd had already broken the walls when an unaccountable panic sent them running to be cut down, and not one of these swarms reached Palestine. The contrast comes immediately after: the Turkish commander Kilij Aslaun advanced expecting the same undisciplined rabble and met the most experienced captains of the age instead, and was beaten.
“How many escaped their arrows we are not informed; but not one of them reached Palestine.”
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3 more claims
At Antioch the army's fighting strength came from superstition rather than from numbers or health — and the belief was deliberately engineered.
By the author's own figures barely two hundred knights still had horses and the infantry were sick and emaciated, yet they attacked; two deserters who came back claiming apparitions were believed without question and the despondency lifted at once. The lance that revived them was planted: twelve men dug from sunrise to near sunset and found nothing until the priest who had announced the vision jumped into the pit himself and the point appeared. The same credulity then worked in reverse against the enemy, since drifting white smoke taken for mounted saints routed a host of seventy thousand — fear, the author notes, travels faster than enthusiasm.
“but they did not know the almost incredible valour which superstition had infused into their hearts.”
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Turning from how they won to how they lost, the author argues the Crusaders' defeats were self-inflicted — waste, treachery-dependence and the leaders' jealousy, not Saracen strength.
Abundance was squandered so fast that famine began within ten days, with most of each slaughtered animal thrown away out of daintiness, and of 300,000 who first invested Antioch only 60,000 were left after hunger and plague. Antioch itself fell by a bribed Armenian officer surrendering his tower, not by assault. Before Damascus, twenty claimants quarrelled over a principality in a city not yet taken, then shifted to the far side and left the weakest, half-demolished wall free to be refortified and resupplied. The pattern repeats later: after Azotus the open road to Jerusalem was wasted while the army sat at Jaffa until Saladin could fight again, and in Egypt a superb opening created by Camhel's revolt was spent on revelry after the key tower fell.
“So insane was their extravagance, that in less than ten days famine began to stare them in the face.”
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The movement declined because ideas and beliefs had changed, not because Europe was tired — so later expeditions had to be carried by knights and then by kings.
Endorsing Guizot, the author notes that thirteenth-century men could not be wearied by crusades their great-grandfathers had made; what changed was that communes grew strong, order and comfort took root, and chivalry and the Trouvères softened minds, while settled knights married Eastern wives — King Baldwin first among them — so hatred of the Saracen cooled and the fiercest later battles were fought by fresh European levies. By the third expedition the epidemic frenzy was extinct and nations watched their princes arm with cold indifference, leaving minstrels and troubadours to recruit knights for prowess and ladies' favour; by Louis IX's day a minstrel's dialogue gave the better arguments to the man who stayed home, and the heir to the English throne could raise only fifteen hundred men.
“The people refused to believe what their ancestors were persuaded of.”
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How it works
The 3 mechanisms the chapter’s argument runs on.
Mechanism 1
Danger made pilgrimage more attractive
Because the merit of a pilgrimage was measured by what it cost the pilgrim, harsher treatment on the road promised fuller pardon for grave sins. So persecution did not deter travellers but advertised a better bargain, and returning pilgrims' tales of insult pulled fresh crowds out of every town.
Mechanism 2
Expectation manufactures miracles
Once everyone was already waiting for divine approval, any striking or ambiguous event was read as the sign they expected rather than examined. An unusually bright aurora became God's armies destroying the infidels, and a monk who cut a cross into his own forehead was fed by offerings precisely because he claimed an angel had done it.
Mechanism 3
A prophet trapped by his own success
A successful impostor must keep supplying revelations, and each new one has to match the last. The author's example is a man whose saints told incompatible stories a week apart, so it was the accumulating inconsistency, not anyone's scepticism, that wore out even a very willing audience.
Common misreadings
The crusading multitudes went east out of sincere religious conviction, and the greed and politics were later corruptions.
The author presents the mixed motives as present from the start: the preaching itself promised a land of milk and honey to be divided among the takers, the papal edict cancelled every crusading debtor's and outlaw's liabilities, and waverers were shamed into enrolling by neighbours handing them a distaff — which is why this chapter treats religion as only one of several causes acting at once.
“Every one of these causes influenced the Crusades, and conspired to render them the most extraordinary instance upon record of the extent to which popular enthusiasm can be carried.”
The CrusadesRead in context →
The later Crusades petered out because two centuries of fighting had exhausted Europe's men and money.
The author sides with Guizot: people cannot be worn out by expeditions they never went on, and the thirteenth century was a different generation from the twelfth. What had shifted was belief and circumstance — strengthened communes, settled order and comfort, softened manners, and intermarriage that cooled hatred of the Saracen — so men were simply less willing to leave home.
“The people refused to believe what their ancestors were persuaded of.”
The CrusadesRead in context →
Key concepts in The Crusades
- Folly of the age
- Each era plunges into one scheme or madness driven by gain, excitement, imitation, or political and religious pressure.
- Where it applies: Describes a recurring pattern, not a prediction of which folly a given age will choose.
- Millennial terror of 1000
- The widespread eleventh-century belief that the world was ending and Christ would judge mankind at Jerusalem.
- Where it applies: Mackay treats it as a delusion that swelled pilgrim numbers, not as a cause of the Crusades by itself.
- Pilgrim relic trade
- A market in Holy Land tokens, much of it forged, sold at high prices to European churches and monasteries.
- Where it applies: Evidence of credulity and profiteering, not of the pilgrims' core religious motive.
- Man exactly suited to the age
- A leader succeeds not by being ahead of his time but by embodying it and reading its secret first.
- Where it applies: Explains Peter the Hermit's reception; the enthusiasm existed before him.
- Convergence of class motives
- Clergy and kings acted from policy, nobles from turbulence and fear of hell, the people from religious zeal.
- Where it applies: A motive map of Europe in 1095, not a claim that all classes wanted the same outcome.
- Dieu le veult
- The spontaneous crowd shout Urban reinterprets as God speaking through their lips, then installs as the army's war-cry.
- Where it applies: Describes how a leader converts crowd emotion into sanctioned doctrine, not the theology itself.
31 more concepts
- Self-fulfilling miracle
- Everyone already expected the news, so when it matched their wishes they called the speed supernatural.
- Where it applies: Applies where expectation precedes the event, not to genuinely unforeseen reports.
- Fear of ridicule as recruiter
- Hesitators were mocked with a distaff or knitting-needle until they joined within a day.
- Where it applies: Explains conversion of scoffers, not the original enthusiasm.
- Popular imitativeness
- Yesterday's jeerers catch the same frenzy today and sell everything at ruinous prices.
- Where it applies: Reused from earlier chapters; here it works through neighbours rather than markets.
- Paroxysm of the madness of Europe
- The peak phase in which leaderless crusading mobs plundered and massacred until destroyed.
- Where it applies: Describes the popular hordes, not the later princely armies.
- Tempered fanaticism of the chiefs
- Leaders shared the age's zeal but diluted it with caution, worldly ambition and chivalry.
- Where it applies: Not disinterested piety; not pure cynicism either.
- Contagious credulity
- Shared belief in marvels that could swing an army between panic and victory.
- Where it applies: Applies to armies in collective fear, not individual superstition alone.
- Riding the torrent of public will
- Chiefs joined a movement they could not stop, hoping to profit from it.
- Where it applies: Explains motive, not military outcome.
- Improvidence in plenty
- Whenever supplies arrived, the host feasted and wasted them, so famine returned within days.
- Where it applies: Describes the crowd's habit under weak command, not a single leader's decision.
- Religious madness as engine
- Faith, not worldly incentive, was what actually moved the crowd; Bohemund's threats failed where a priest's vision worked.
- Where it applies: Mackay reports it as the crowd's motive force, leaving Peter Barthelemy's sincerity undecided.
- Omens read in extremity
- Hurricane, earthquake and comet were each turned into prophecy as misery sharpened the appetite for signs.
- Where it applies: Applies to the besieging camp's despair; the same crowd ignored religion in prosperity.
- Planted relic
- A sacred object secretly buried by its 'discoverer' so the finding looks miraculous.
- Where it applies: Works only where the audience already wants the miracle; it cannot survive a hostile cross-examination.
- Contagious dreaming
- Once one visionary is rewarded, others start having matching visions.
- Where it applies: Breaks down when the imitated visions begin to contradict each other.
- Useful imposture
- Leaders who privately disbelieve a fraud protect it because it produces obedience and courage.
- Where it applies: Protection lasts only while the fraud is useful; rival chiefs then use the ordeal to destroy it.
- Misread omen
- An ordinary sight read, in a state of high faith, as visible divine intervention.
- Where it applies: Requires a prior shared expectation of rescue; the same smoke meant nothing to the Turks.
- Climax and decline of the mania
- Crowd madness has a peak; each later Crusade drew less zeal until enthusiasm died out entirely.
- Where it applies: Describes aggregate public feeling, not the fate of individual campaigns.
- Weariness is not inherited
- Guizot's point that a generation cannot be tired by labours its ancestors performed; belief changed instead.
- Where it applies: Explains change between generations, not fatigue within one campaign.
- Crusades as civiliser
- The expeditions themselves loosened noble tyranny, grew communes, widened minds and weakened priestly thraldom.
- Where it applies: Mackay credits absence of nobles and contact with Saracens, chiefly in France.
- Reason versus passion in preaching
- St. Bernard persuaded by argument and sanctity; Peter the Hermit inflamed passions.
- Where it applies: A contrast of method and era, not of sincerity or zeal.
- Chivalric motive replacing zeal
- By the third expedition men went east to win personal glory and ladies' favour, not for the sepulchre.
- Where it applies: Applies to knights and retainers, not to the indifferent or hostile populace.
- Fatal disunion of leaders
- Chiefs agreed on the plan but each insisted on his own means, so jealousy destroyed a nearly won siege.
- Where it applies: A failure of coordination, not of military strength or supply.
- Saladin's tithe
- A tenth of all property levied on everyone unwilling or unable to take the cross.
- Where it applies: Raised armies but turned French and English indifference into aversion.
- Excusing the failed prophet
- When Bernard's prediction failed, advocates redefined success as peopling heaven with martyrs.
- Where it applies: Persuaded zealots only; plain people kept their own opinion.
- Discord among crusading leaders
- Mutual jealousy among commanders that cancels military success.
- Where it applies: Describes leadership rivalry, not troop morale or enemy strength.
- Squandered favourable moment
- A rare opening an actor cannot use because its own disorder blinds or paralyses it.
- Where it applies: Describes failure from internal vice, not from enemy strength.
- Strategy of striking the source
- Attacking the power base that feeds an enemy's armies rather than the contested ground itself.
- Where it applies: In this chapter it is sound in plan yet undone by the executors' conduct.
- Cooling of popular zeal
- Crowd enthusiasm for the Crusades dies out once the cost is felt as tax and the glory as risk.
- Where it applies: Applies to the masses, not to kings and nobles whose motives were personal fame and piety.
- Dream as divine intimation
- A fever delirium is read as a command from heaven and becomes state policy.
- Where it applies: Describes the leader's private motive, not the army's reasons for following.
- Success as unnerving
- Easy victory breeds ease, luxury and disease, so the winners decay before the next battle.
- Where it applies: Mackay ties it to a hot unfamiliar climate as well as to moral slackness.
- Exhausted mania
- A delusion that burns out on its own timetable and cannot be rekindled by preaching, however urgent.
- Where it applies: Describes the decay of enthusiasm, not the defeat of armies; Acre fell to force, but Europe's silence came from spent feeling.
- Good out of evil
- Mackay's reading that providence turned the very fanaticism aimed at the East into progress for the West.
- Where it applies: A retrospective balance sheet, not a defence of the Crusades' motives or conduct.
- Instructive value of past error
- Studying a collective madness for what its causes and results teach, rather than merely condemning it.
- Where it applies: Mackay stops short of full treatment here, explicitly leaving conclusions to the reader.
Reader’s notes on The CrusadesAI reading companion
“A grove of a hundred oaks would not have furnished all the wood sold in little morsels as remnants of the true cross”
Read in context →Mackay's best weapon is arithmetic. He doesn't argue against relics, he counts them — and the counting does the demolition.
“Thus, while Feudalism told them they had no rights in this world, Religion told them they had every right in the next.”
Read in context →A sharp sentence, almost too neat. It casts the clergy as both the people's only protector and the designer of their cage — he never resolves which.
“The only religion they felt was the religion of fear.”
Read in context →Note the asymmetry of his sympathy: the peasants are deluded, the nobles are merely vicious. One class gets psychology, the other gets a verdict.
17 more notes
“Not a meteor shot athwart the horizon that did not fill a district with alarm”
Read in context →The mechanism of mass delusion in one image — sky becomes scripture, and every random flare recruits another twenty walkers.
“The greater the dangers of the way, the fairer chance that sins of deep dye would be atoned for.”
Read in context →Here's the engine: persecution raises the price, and the price is the appeal. Suffering can't deter a market that's buying suffering.
“Peter the Hermit was exactly suited to the age; neither behind it nor in advance of it”
Read in context →He wants it both ways — the age is a loaded train needing only a torch, yet the torch is also a great man. Determinism with a hero smuggled in.
“God himself pronounced them by your lips, for it was he that put them in your hearts”
Read in context →Urban converts a crowd's noise into revelation on the spot. The shrewdest improvisation in the chapter — and Mackay flags it as presence of mind, not piety.
“Palestine was, he said, a land flowing with milk and honey”
Read in context →The pivot from souls to real estate, placed so casually. Pardon for sins and a share of the land, in the same breath.
“Every debtor who joined the Crusade was freed by the papal edict from the claims of his creditors; outlaws of every grade were made equal with the honest upon the same conditions.”
Read in context →The spiritual offer had a balance sheet. Debt relief and amnesty recruit more reliably than aurora-boreales — holiness becomes the cheapest exit from the law.
“Others, still more zealous, impressed the mark by the same means upon the tender limbs of young children and infants at the breast.”
Read in context →The author lets this land without comment, and the silence does the work. Zeal branded onto someone who cannot consent is where enthusiasm stops being charming.
“If he had acknowledged in the first place that he had made the wound himself, he would not have been thought more holy than his fellows; but the story of the angel was a clincher.”
Read in context →Mackay's dry relish here is the whole thesis in miniature: crowds don't reward the deed, they reward the narrative attached to it. The fat monk is his best witness.
“his more zealous neighbours sent him a present of a knitting-needle or a distaff, to shew their contempt of him”
Read in context →So the engine wasn't faith at all — it was shame, gendered and local. A distaff did what Urban's thundering couldn't.
“the sounds of lewd revelry and the voice of prayer rose at the same instant from the camp”
Read in context →The indulgence logic taken to its honest conclusion: if sin is pre-forgiven, why ration it? The doctrine manufactured exactly the behavior it meant to redeem.
“Very few knew where Jerusalem was. Some thought it fifty thousand miles away”
Read in context →Three hundred thousand people liquidated everything to reach a place they couldn't locate. The children's question is the adults' question, just asked out loud.
“Any maniac can kindle a conflagration, but it may require many wise men to put it out.”
Read in context →The sentence Peter's whole career exists to prove. A man who could summon a hundred thousand had no more authority over them than "the obscurest soldier" — charisma scales, control doesn't.
“he soon found a pretext to hurry them into Asia Minor”
Read in context →Alexius's calculation is the coldest note in the chapter: the Turks were the lesser threat. He didn't fight the crusade, he aimed it away from himself.
“they were preceded by a goose and goat, which they believed to be holy, and animated with divine power to discover the retreats of the unbelievers”
Read in context →The detail is almost comic until you see what the goose was used for. This is where the chapter's amused tone becomes unbearable — a pogrom with livestock for oracles.
“At this moment of victory an unaccountable fear came over them. Throwing down their arms, they fled panic-stricken, no one knew why”
Read in context →Mass delusion breaks exactly the way it formed — contagiously, for no reason anyone could name. The same mechanism that marched them across Europe killed them at the breach.
“their valour being tempered by caution, their religious zeal by worldly views, and their ferocity by the spirit of chivalry”
Read in context →A beautiful formula — but notice what it concedes: the nobles had the same three vices, merely diluted. Mackay's praise of chivalry is actually a chemistry of dosage.
“It is upon these men that romance has lavished her most admiring epithets, leaving to the condemnation of history the vileness and brutality of those who went before.”
Read in context →The real division isn't moral, it's a division of labor between genres. Rabble get history's verdict; princes get romance's adjectives.
A reader’s takeAI reading companion
The crusades failed not because armies lost but because ideas changed
Read whole, Mackay's chapter on the Crusades is less a history of two centuries than a single long experiment in how a crowd catches fire and how it burns out, and the chapter's shape is its argument: a slow fuse of pilgrimage, relic-trade, taxation and millennial dread; a flashpoint at Clermont; a first paroxysm so unled that it dies in Hungary and Mersburg before reaching an enemy; then a long, cooling descent through chivalric expeditions, Damascus, Acre, Damietta, Massoura, and finally a truce broken and a coast lost — ending not in defeat so much as in exhaustion, with preachers shouting into a silence where 'Dieu le veult' used to answer. The spine that holds those two hundred pages together is the claim Mackay borrows from Guizot and makes his own: the later Crusades failed not because Europe was tired but because Europe had changed its mind. Ideas, not armies, were the decisive terrain.
What I saw through, reading closely, is that Mackay's account of motive is far more materialist than its pious surface admits, and he knows it. The famous engine is not faith. It is the papal balance sheet — debts cancelled, outlaws made equal with honest men, Palestine advertised as land flowing with milk and honey in the same breath as pardon for sin; it is the price mechanism by which danger on the road raised rather than lowered the value of the journey, so that a market buying suffering could not be deterred by suffering; and most devastatingly it is shame, local and gendered, the knitting-needle and the distaff sent to a hesitating neighbour accomplishing what Urban's thunder could not. Set beside this, the aurora and the shooting stars are almost decorative. The sky mattered because men had already decided to go and needed scripture written where everyone could read it.
Continue reading
My sharpest judgement is that the chapter is two books quarrelling. One is a theory of crowds, in which the age is a loaded train awaiting a torch and individuals are incidental; the other is a gallery of great and ridiculous men, in which Peter the Hermit, Urban, Alexius, Bernard and Richard bend events by temperament. Mackay never reconciles them, and the seam shows most where he is most quotable — Peter 'exactly suited to the age, neither behind it nor in advance of it' is determinism with a hero smuggled inside. The same unresolved doubleness governs his sympathy. Peasants receive psychology: fear, ignorance, contagion, a religion that promised them everything in the next world precisely because feudalism gave them nothing in this one. Nobles receive a verdict, and then, strangely, a pardon — their valour 'tempered by caution, their zeal by worldly views, their ferocity by chivalry' concedes that the princes carried the identical vices at a gentler dose. His praise of chivalry turns out to be a chemistry of dilution, and the real line he draws across the chapter is not moral but generic: the rabble are handed to history for condemnation while the same impulses in armour are handed to romance for adjectives. That division of labour between genres is, I think, the most important thing in the chapter that Mackay did not intend to say.
He is at his best when he stops arguing and starts counting or simply quoting. The grove of a hundred oaks that could not have supplied all the fragments of the true cross demolishes relics without a word of theology. The fat monk who branded a cross into his own flesh and credited an angel is the whole thesis in miniature: crowds do not reward the deed, they reward the story fastened to it, and a confessed self-wound would have earned nothing. The pilgrims who liquidated everything to reach a city some believed fifty thousand miles away show that the children's question was the adults' question, only asked aloud. And the two places where he keeps silent are the places that hurt most — the crosses burned into infants who could not consent, and the band that marched behind a goose and a goat believed to be divinely gifted at finding unbelievers, which is where the chapter's amused tone becomes unbearable, because what the oracle was used for was a pogrom.
Two structural observations I would press on any reader. First, the mechanism is symmetrical: the panic that threw down weapons at the moment of victory, for no cause anyone could name, is the same contagion that had marched those men across a continent. Delusion does not break by argument; it breaks the way it formed. Second, the chapter is quietly a study in the asymmetry of power over crowds. Any maniac can kindle a conflagration; it may take many wise men to put it out — and Peter, who could summon a hundred thousand, commanded them no better than the obscurest soldier. Charisma scales; control does not. Alexius is the cold-eyed man who understood this best: he never tried to stop the flood, he aimed it away from himself and into Asia Minor, having judged the Turks the lesser threat.
What I want to tell the reader is this. Do not read the Crusades here as a story about medieval credulity, and do not be flattered by Mackay's confidence that his own century had outgrown it. Every lever he exposes is still in working order: the amnesty bundled with the altar call, the cost of entry mistaken for proof of worth, the random event promoted to omen, the neighbour's contempt doing the recruiting, the narrative that sanctifies a wound the hand made itself. And read his conclusion with the attention he earns it: after the tally of ruin he grants the unintended gains — contact, commerce, loosened feudal grip, a wider world. That is the chapter's last and most adult thought, and also its most dangerous one, because consequences that nobody intended cannot retroactively justify the intention. Mackay set out to prove how foolish the Crusades were and ended up proving something harder and less comfortable: that mass delusion is not an error in reasoning to be corrected but a market, with prices, incentives, social enforcement and genuine returns to some of its participants — which is exactly why counting the wood of the true cross is more useful than arguing about it, and why the fire went out only when the buyers, at last, stopped wanting what was for sale.
Read The Crusades with these cards beside each passage.
Open in FeedLitraThe Witch Mania
How did the Stedinger come to be branded heretics and witches?
How The Witch Mania unfoldsAI-assisted
Opening: the belief before the persecution. Mackay begins not with a trial but with a psychological root. The witch creed, he argues, grows out of the hope of immortality — the conviction that unseen beings surround us — twisted by ignorance of natural causes into dread. Where mountain mirages, apparent multiple suns, and the hypochondriac's delusions were not yet schoolroom facts, every unexplained event and private misfortune needed an author, and the witch supplied one. He then sketches the monks' devil: not a grand adversary but a petty, grotesque, almost comic figure, and out of that imagination the demonologists built a full creed of demons, pacts, and the Sabbath. Scripture, crucially, enters as corroboration rather than cause. The Mosaic clause, on the best authorities, punished those who pretended to divination — a penalty for pretenders proving nothing about real powers — but medieval readers inverted the logic and took the prohibition as proof that witches existed and must die. From Charlemagne's edicts against tempest-raising and milk-drying onward, the belief had legal teeth.
Development: the charge as a weapon. Once witchcraft was a capital crime it became an all-purpose instrument, reached for precisely when ordinary force or lesser accusations had failed. Mackay's examples are chosen to show that pattern: the free Stedinger, unbeaten through twenty-eight years of war, were branded heretics and witches and crushed by a forty-thousand-man crusade with eight thousand killed; Philip IV, having failed with other charges, probably invented most of the Templar accusations and burned fifty-nine at once near Paris, with Jacques de Molay to follow; then Joan of Arc, then the Waldenses of Arras in 1459. Innocent VIII's bull of 1488 and Sprenger's Malleus turn this opportunism into machinery. Here Mackay identifies the engine that will drive the rest of the chapter: licensed torture, leading questions, an exhausted prisoner agreeing to whatever is suggested — and confessions that come out identical, which the courts then read as independent corroboration. The method manufactures its own proof. The sixteenth-century French cases follow in a grim catalogue — Garnier, Rollet, the Auvergne wolf-wife, spreading parliamentary decrees, with the Paris acquittal of fourteen standing out as a rarity.
Britain: statute first, then panic. Mackay's British section makes a pointed structural claim — the persecution began with legislation and was then inflamed by a king's credulity, not by spontaneous popular fury. England named the crime in 1541 and made witchcraft capital in itself in 1562; Scotland's 1563 act condemned witches and those who consulted them, and epidemic fear followed immediately, climaxing in the Warbois case and in local Scottish commissions that burned uncounted victims with no central record. James VI then adopts the delusion as a personal hobby: the 1591 Gellie Duncan trial, the summons to replay her reel at the palace, the flattery of being told the devil called him an enemy, the North Berwick storm plot. Mackay's own moderate estimate is some two hundred executions a year across thirty-nine years, and over four hundred a year around 1590–93. The Demonology legitimised the tests, the 1604 English act hardened the punishment, and the delusion acquired a profession: Hopkins and the Scottish "common prickers," paid a fee per town and a bounty per burning, so that finding nobody meant losing money. Watching and starving a suspect until anything odd counted as evidence met the quota, and convictions multiplied with earnings rather than with guilt — until the courts finally called them cheats.
The turn: a change in evidence, not in law. The chapter's hinge is quiet and procedural. Sir Matthew Hale in 1664 could still convict at St Edmondsbury on children vomiting crooked pins and a twopenny nail; a generation later Chief Justice Holt simply appealed to jurors' common sense, and all eleven witchcraft trials before him between 1694 and 1701 ended in acquittal. Juries could still convict — Jane Wenham in 1711 — but the judge's efforts won her a pardon; the last English execution came in 1716, and the statute was not repealed until 1736. Scotland was cured the same way, more slowly: after more than four thousand suffered in the decade following the 1649 act, Mackenzie reported in 1680 that imprisoned women had nothing against them but absurd tortured confessions, and they were discharged. The law stayed on the books for decades after the courts stopped believing it. What died was the evidence, not the statute.
The Continent: justice suspended by design. Mackay then widens the frame, and the continental picture is worse because the exemption from ordinary justice was deliberate. Bodinus held that a person accused of sorcery should never be acquitted unless the prosecutor's malice were plainer than the sun; Boguet's seventy articles admitted children testifying against their parents and disreputable witnesses as credible. With church and state both behind such rules, acquittal became nearly impossible and burning became industrial: roughly three hundred a year at Cologne, four hundred at Bamberg, and the Würzburg register for 1627–29 listing one hundred and fifty-seven burned in the city alone, children of nine and ten among them — German cities averaging around six hundred executions a year, close to two a day. The Lille schoolgirls show the third mechanism at work: an adult repeating her terrors daily plants the images, the children report them as experience, and one child's story sets off fits and confessions in the rest, with no outside accuser needed. Relief comes from exposure and from procedure — the Duke of Brunswick staging a false confession that names two Jesuits, Spee's Cautio Criminalis, and above all the abolition of torture — though Rouen's parliament still pleads for executions, and the panics flare again at Mohra in 1669 with seventy dead, and in New England with nineteen, ending in public penitence. Louis XIV's edict of 1680, Thomasius's thesis of 1701, and the last Würzburg burning in 1749 mark the long ebb.
Close: shrunk, not extinguished. Mackay ends in his own century, and deliberately refuses a triumphant ending. A mob ducking at Burton, Lady Hatton's horse-shoe house, the Hastings scapegoats, Lincolnshire witch-doctors, Okey of Tunbridge Wells, and the French murder of Renard show the creed surviving as folly, charm, and occasional killing. The point of this coda is to close the loop with the opening: the root was never doctrine, which is why repealing the law could not pull it up. Mackay also resists the comfortable reading that this was cruelty imposed from above on innocent victims — the delusion was as complete in the accused and the crowd as on the bench. A weaver confessed to being a warlock because he had seen the devil dancing like a fly round his candle; boys who parroted printed exorcism jargon as a game were burned alive at Würzburg; a popular ballad of 1627 treated the hangman dressing as the devil to extract a confession as excellent fun. That shared belief is Mackay's real subject, and it explains his bleakest claim: wise and mild men committed murder in good faith.
Key claims, with the lines that support them
Not knowing natural causes, people charged every unexplained event and private misfortune to witchcraft.
The author points to sights once thought supernatural — mountain mirages, apparent multiple suns, the delusions of the hypochondriac — that are now ordinary schoolroom facts, and notes that the man who believes himself a wolf is sent to hospital rather than the stake; where that knowledge was missing, German cities averaged some six hundred executions a year, roughly two a day.
“Every calamity that befell him he attributed to a witch.”
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Scripture did not create the belief; a misread verse of Mosaic law gave an existing superstition deadly confidence.
Building on the previous point, the author argues the Hebrew text punished people who pretended to divination, and a penalty for pretenders proves nothing about real powers — medieval readers inverted the logic, taking the prohibition as proof that witches existed and must die.
“A misunderstanding of the famous text of the Mosaic law, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” no doubt led many conscientious men astray, whose superstition, warm enough before, wanted but a little corroboration to blaze out with desolating fury.”
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Once witchcraft was a capital crime it became an all-purpose weapon, reached for exactly when ordinary force or lesser charges had failed.
From Charlemagne's edicts punishing tempest-raising and milk-drying onward, the author lists persecutions whose real offence was political or religious: the free Stedinger, unbeaten through twenty-eight years of war, were branded heretics and witches and destroyed by a forty-thousand-man crusade with eight thousand killed; Philip IV, having failed with other accusations, probably invented most of the Templar charges and burned fifty-nine at once near Paris, with Jacques de Molay following.
“After this time, prosecutions for witchcraft are continually mentioned, especially by the French historians.”
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3 more claims
In Britain the persecution began with legislation and was then inflamed by a king's personal credulity, not by spontaneous popular panic.
The author dates England's persecution from statute — 1541 first named the crime, 1562 made witchcraft capital in itself — and Scotland's from the 1563 act that condemned both witches and those who consulted them, after which epidemic fear followed immediately. James VI then made the 1591 trial his own hobby, summoning Gellie Duncan to replay her reel at the palace and flattered that the devil called him an enemy; the author's own moderate estimate puts executions at some two hundred a year across thirty-nine years, over four hundred a year around 1590-93.
“From that date the persecution may be fairly said to have commenced in England.”
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On the Continent jurists deliberately placed witchcraft outside ordinary justice, which made acquittal almost impossible and burnings industrial.
Bodinus held that a person accused of sorcery should never be acquitted unless the prosecutor's malice was plainer than the sun, and Boguet's seventy articles let children testify against their parents and disreputable witnesses be believed; with church and state both behind such rules, Cologne burned about three hundred a year and Bamberg four hundred, and the Würzburg register for 1627-29 lists one hundred and fifty-seven burned in the city alone, children of nine and ten among them.
“Whoever adheres to the ordinary course of justice perverts the spirit of the law, both divine and human.”
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What ended the trials was mainly a change in what courts would accept as evidence, not a change in the written law.
Where Sir Matthew Hale in 1664 convicted on children vomiting crooked pins and a twopenny nail, Chief Justice Holt appealed to jurors' common sense and all eleven witchcraft trials before him between 1694 and 1701 ended in acquittal; juries could still convict, as with Jane Wenham in 1711, but the judge's efforts won her a pardon. Scotland was cured the same way more slowly: after more than four thousand suffered in the decade following the 1649 act, Mackenzie in 1680 reported that imprisoned women had nothing against them but absurd tortured confessions, and they were discharged.
“In 1664, the venerable Sir Matthew Hale condemned two women, named Amy Duny and Rose Cullender, to the stake at St. Edmondsbury, upon evidence the most ridiculous.”
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How it works
The 3 mechanisms the chapter’s argument runs on.
Mechanism 1
Torture breeds matching confessions
Once papal commissions licensed torture, examiners asked leading questions and the exhausted prisoner agreed to whatever was suggested; the resulting confessions looked identical, and courts read that sameness as independent corroboration, so the method kept producing its own proof.
Mechanism 2
Payment per witch found
Witch-finders were paid a fee per town and a bounty for each person burned, so finding nobody meant losing money. Watching and starving a suspect until anything odd counted as evidence let them meet that quota, and convictions multiplied with their earnings rather than with guilt.
Mechanism 3
Fear taught to children
An adult who repeats her terrors daily to children plants the images, and the children then report them as experience; one child's story triggers fits and confessions in the rest, until a whole group describes the same flights and feasts without any outside accuser.
Common misreadings
The witch mania came out of the Bible — religious law commanded it, so believers simply obeyed.
The author treats the sacred text as corroboration rather than cause: the belief already existed from ignorance of nature, and the Mosaic clause, on the best authorities, forbade pretending to divination, which says nothing about whether real witches exist. The deadly step was the medieval inference drawn from it, and the belief ran across every church — Lutherans and Calvinists eventually burned more than the Romanists.
“A misunderstanding of the famous text of the Mosaic law, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” no doubt led many conscientious men astray, whose superstition, warm enough before, wanted but a little corroboration to blaze out with desolating fury.”
The Witch ManiaRead in context →
It was cruelty imposed from above: judges, popes and witch-finders knew it was nonsense and the ordinary people were innocent victims.
The author insists the delusion was as complete in the accused and the crowd as in the court. Prisoners genuinely believed themselves guilty — a weaver confessed to being a warlock because he had seen the devil dancing like a fly round his candle — boys who repeated printed exorcism jargon as a game were burned alive at Würzburg, and a popular ballad of 1627 treated the hangman dressing as the devil to extract a confession as excellent fun. That is why wise and mild men could commit murder in good faith.
“But throughout all this fearful period the delusion of the criminals was as great as that of the judges.”
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Key concepts in The Witch Mania
- Epidemic terror
- A shared panic in which everyone feels personally threatened by invisible enemies, so ordinary misfortune is read as attack.
- Where it applies: Describes a society-wide state, not individual madness; Mackay dates it to about two and a half centuries in Europe.
- Misread Mosaic text
- The verse against 'witches' originally targeted poisoners and fortune-tellers, but was read as proof that real magical power exists.
- Where it applies: Mackay's point is philological and limited: a law against pretenders does not establish the thing pretended.
- Grotesque devil of the monks
- A clownish, cudgel-beaten imp invented for miracle plays, ridiculous rather than awful, until Milton made evil grand.
- Where it applies: Ludicrous only when viewed apart from its consequences; restored to context it turns horrifying.
- Witchcraft as political pretext
- An accusation so easy to make and so hard to refute that the powerful used it to destroy enemies whose real offence was political or religious. Accusing an enemy of sorcery when ordinary charges and ordinary warfare fail to destroy them.
- Where it applies: Applies to cases like the Stedinger, Templars, Joan of Arc and Arras, where the charge masked other motives. Explains elite-driven persecutions; less apt for spontaneous village panics.
- The devil of persecution
- Persecution itself breeds new witches, so prosecutors mistake their own output for proof of the crime.
- Where it applies: Applies where law and religion both recognise the offence and torture is routine.
- Confession educed by torture
- Identical questions plus the rack produce identical answers, which are then read as independent corroboration.
- Where it applies: Undercuts confession evidence generally, not only in witch trials.
30 more concepts
- Bull of Pope Innocent
- Innocent VIII's 1488 decree appointing inquisitors everywhere, the spark of the full mania.
- Where it applies: A trigger, not the origin; persecution already existed before it.
- Witchcraft as a crime per se
- Punishing witchcraft itself, with no need to prove any harm done to anyone.
- Where it applies: Earlier English statutes punished only spells aimed at a neighbour's life; the shift dates from 1562 in England and 1563 in Scotland.
- Loup-garou indictment
- Formal court charges that a man turned into a wolf and ate children.
- Where it applies: A French courtroom category of the 1570s, prosecuted alongside witchcraft rather than treated as madness.
- Devil's mark examination
- Pricking a suspect's body to see if any spot feels no pain, taken as proof of guilt.
- Where it applies: Its logic collapses when physicians apply it honestly, as Pigray's commission did in 1589.
- Reformers as persecutors
- Protestant leaders kept and hardened witch belief instead of reforming it away.
- Where it applies: Mackay concedes English persecution began later than continental, but denies it was milder.
- Self-fulfilling accusation
- A victim so constantly called a witch that she comes to believe and confess it.
- Where it applies: Reinforced by appearance, neighbourhood consensus and torture; her husband and daughter resisted to the end.
- Endowed delusion
- Confiscated money funding an annual sermon that keeps the error officially commemorated.
- Where it applies: Preached at Queen's College, Cambridge, apparently as late as 1718.
- Local witch commissions
- The Privy Council licensed country gentlemen and ministers to try and burn witches in their own parishes, leaving no records.
- Where it applies: Explains unrecorded mass executions, not the few High Court cases.
- Torture-made confession
- Pain, not evidence, produced the strikingly identical stories of devil-meetings and storm-raising.
- Where it applies: Does not mean every accused was innocent of all crime.
- Witch-pricking trade
- Paid vagabonds hunted insensible spots on aged bodies as proof of guilt.
- Where it applies: A market in accusation, distinct from judicial procedure itself.
- Confession from destitution
- Defamed poor women confessed to escape starvation and persecution, preferring death.
- Where it applies: Mackenzie's point about the poor, not about wealthy accused like Macalzean.
- Witch-finding as a trade
- Men paid per discovered witch, so their income depended on finding guilt.
- Where it applies: Describes the paid profession, not sincere believers who profited nothing.
- Unfalsifiable ordeal
- A test whose every possible outcome counts against the accused.
- Where it applies: Applies to the proofs themselves, not to the confessions obtained by torture.
- Royal encouragement of delusion
- A king who both fought and fed witchcraft belief by publishing its rules.
- Where it applies: Credit for spreading belief, not for inventing the persecution.
- Force of imagination in the accuser
- The supposed victim's fits were triggered by her own belief she was touched by a witch, not by any witch's act.
- Where it applies: Explains self-generated symptoms, not deliberate fraud like planted pins.
- Judicial sifting of evidence
- Courts began distrusting confessions and prickers and demanding clear proof, which saved lives.
- Where it applies: Reform came from judges' practice; popular belief lagged behind.
- Persecution breeding its own increase
- Harsh statutes and eager magistrates multiplied accusations rather than reducing witches.
- Where it applies: Describes Scotland 1649-1659 especially; not every spike has this cause.
- Suspended rules of evidence
- A special legal doctrine holding that witchcraft is too secret to prove normally, so ordinary safeguards are dropped.
- Where it applies: Applies to crimes framed as undetectable; collapses once proof standards are restored.
- Suspicion as proof
- Mere suspicion, or silent and tearless behaviour, counted as positive evidence of guilt.
- Where it applies: Needs a tribunal willing to treat demeanour as data.
- Self-accusing deluded
- Sick or disturbed people volunteered confessions of witchcraft, feeding the panic from below.
- Where it applies: Explains part, not most, of the victim lists.
- Contagious confession by suggestion
- One person's fearful story spreads until a whole group sincerely believes and confesses the same impossible things.
- Where it applies: Applies where fear is repeatedly rehearsed in a closed group, not where accusers act from private malice.
- Confession extorted by pain
- A statement produced by torture, which proves only that the victim wanted the pain to stop.
- Where it applies: Discredits the evidence, not necessarily the accused's innocence by itself.
- Demonstration by staged confession
- Proving a method is worthless by using it to produce an accusation the audience knows is false.
- Where it applies: Persuades only those with first-hand knowledge of the falsehood.
- Contagion of mental disease
- Hysterical symptoms spreading person to person by imitation and brooding, like an epidemic.
- Where it applies: Applies to suggestible groups in close contact under a shared fear, not to isolated illness.
- Torturing facts into theory
- Treating absurd confessions as proof because one already believes the conclusion.
- Where it applies: Describes the credulous investigator, not every error of judgment.
- Unworking faith
- A belief still held in the villages but no longer acted on by courts, so it claims no victims.
- Where it applies: Marks the stage between legal persecution and genuine disbelief.
- Lingering superstition
- A delusion that survives legal repeal, living on in local custom, charms and village persecution.
- Where it applies: Describes residual belief among small groups, not the organised mass trials of earlier ages.
- Entangled roots of error
- Mackay's image: the visible tree of delusion is felled, but buried roots can sprout again under a new patron.
- Where it applies: A metaphor about revival potential, not a claim that the mania itself persisted at full strength.
- Cure by faith in the charlatan
- The patient improves because he believes the quack, not because the remedy works.
- Where it applies: Explains felt relief in subjective complaints; the abscess case ends with the doctor retracting his diagnosis.
- Self-cultivated marvel
- The accused embraces her fearful reputation because dreaded power flatters the powerless.
- Where it applies: Applies to the Hastings woman and the fisherman tested with needles, not to victims who denied the charge.
Reader’s notes on The Witch ManiaAI reading companion
“not visitations of Providence, but the works of some neighbouring hag”
Read in context →The displacement is the whole mechanism: blame has to land on a body, and it lands on whoever is already least defended.
“six hundred annually, or two every day, if we leave out the Sundays”
Read in context →Mackay's deadpan arithmetic does more than outrage would — the Sabbath exemption makes the bookkeeping obscene.
“the Bible established the existence of the power of divination by its edicts against those who pretended to it”
Read in context →Sharp point: outlawing a fraud got read as certifying the thing was real. Prohibition as proof.
17 more notes
“there have been cases in which men were perfectly persuaded that they were teapots”
Read in context →He pulls teapots in next to mountain mirages to flatten mystery into pathology — confident, and a bit too pleased with his own century.
“The man who now imagines himself a wolf is sent to the hospital instead of to the stake”
Read in context →The delusion didn't vanish, the institution changed. Whether that's mercy or relabelling he doesn't ask.
“answered the purpose of the clown in the modern pantomime”
Read in context →A theology that needed a terrifying adversary produced a stage buffoon instead. The monks were bad at their own propaganda.
“restore it to the darkness of its own hideous temple”
Read in context →The hinge of the chapter: absurdity is only funny when disarmed of context. He earns the turn by letting us laugh first.
“amounted to no more than seven millions four hundred and five thousand nine hundred and twenty-six”
Read in context →Precision is superstition's favourite costume. The last digit is the tell.
“by their requiring five nurses to suckle them, and by their never growing fat”
Read in context →A diagnostic checklist for a failure-to-thrive infant. Every item of demonology turns out to be a real grief misfiled.
“except it was a good action, in which case the order was disobeyed”
Read in context →Even their nightmare had to stay morally tidy — evil permitted unlimited power, so long as it could never accidentally help.
“the powerful, whenever they wanted to ruin the weak, and could fix no other imputation upon them”
Read in context →Here the chapter stops being about belief at all. Witchcraft is the charge you reach for when you have no charge.
“launching forth his anathema against the Stedinger as heretics and witches”
Read in context →Free peasants with a representative diet become sorcerers precisely when they can't be beaten in the field. Theology arrives as siege equipment.
“sometimes as a goose or a duck, and at others in the figure of a pale black-eyed youth”
Read in context →A pope's official letter sliding from barnyard poultry to a melancholy romantic youth — the bathos gives the whole document away. Nobody inventing a real crime invents a duck.
“They fought with the energy of despair, but all in vain. Eight thousand of them were slain”
Read in context →Forty thousand against eleven thousand — the arithmetic is the real argument. The witchcraft charge was never a belief here, it was a logistics permit.
“when removed from the rack, they denied all they had previously confessed; but this circumstance only increased the outcry”
Read in context →Here is the machine's perfect joint: confession proves guilt, retraction proves relapse. No answer exists that isn't fatal.
“That the malice of a few could invent such a charge is a humiliating thought for the lover of his species; but that millions of mankind should credit it is still more so.”
Read in context →Mackay's thesis in one breath — his quarrel isn't with the villains but with the audience. Credulity, not cruelty, is the disease he's diagnosing.
“it was no other than one in their own employ—the devil of persecution”
Read in context →The sharpest line yet: he takes Florimond's own metaphor and turns the key. The ashes really did breed new witches — because the fire wrote the confessions.
“it became a common prayer with women in the humbler walks of life, that they might never live to grow old”
Read in context →The whole chapter's horror compresses into this. Not a trial, not a bull — a quiet wish not to survive. Poverty plus age plus a woman's body as a capital offense.
“Some confessed that they had had children by the devil; but no one who had ever been a mother gave utterance to such a frantic imagining”
Read in context →An eerily precise observation — the fantasy only survives where no real memory contradicts it. Mackay is reading the confessions as evidence about the confessors, not the devil.
“It was true they might have had the semblance of their wives in their beds, but the originals were far away”
Read in context →The archbishop invents a doctrine on the spot to defeat an alibi. When evidence threatens the verdict, metaphysics expands to swallow it.
A reader’s takeAI reading companion
Nobody inventing a real crime invents a duck
Read whole, "The Witch Mania" is less a history of witches than an anatomy of how a society manufactures culprits, and Mackay builds it in a deliberate arc: from origin, to instrument, to industry, to unwinding, to residue. He begins with a psychological root — the longing for immortality and unseen powers, soured by ignorance — and the chapter's first real move is the displacement it names: misfortune cannot be left as accident or Providence, so it must land on a body, and it lands on whoever is least defended. From there he lets us laugh. The monks' devil is a grotesque buffoon, a pantomime clown with his poultry disguises and his seven million four hundred and five thousand nine hundred and twenty-six demons counted to the last digit; the bull of Innocent VIII slides from a goose to a pale black-eyed youth. Nobody inventing a real crime invents a duck. Then comes the hinge — "restore it to the darkness of its own hideous temple" — and the comedy is revealed as the setup. Absurdity was only ever funny while disarmed; put the same creed in a courtroom with a rack beside it and the arithmetic turns obscene, two a day with Sundays off.
The middle of the chapter is where belief stops mattering at all. Stedinger peasants who could not be beaten in the field become sorcerers; Templars with property become heretics; Joan of Arc, the Waldenses of Arras, the convenient enemies of French crowns — witchcraft is simply the accusation you reach for when you have no accusation, and theology arrives as siege equipment. Sprenger's hammer, the parliamentary decrees, the werewolves of Dole and Auvergne, Scotland's quiet local commissions, James VI and his Gellie Duncan, Hopkins and the common prickers paid by the head: the delusion acquires a payroll. And at its heart sits the perfect joint of the machine — confession proves guilt, retraction proves relapse, no answer exists that is not fatal. When an alibi threatens a verdict, the archbishop invents a doctrine on the spot: the wife in the bed was only a semblance. Metaphysics expands exactly as far as the conviction requires. Mackay's own best stroke is turning Florimond's metaphor back on him: the ashes of the burned really did breed new witches, because the fire wrote the confessions.
Continue reading
The unwinding is the chapter's quietest and most honest stretch, and worth noticing for how unheroic it is. Nothing is refuted; the rules of evidence simply change. Mackenzie shows that torture and destitution, not guilt, produce confessions; Spee's Cautio Criminalis and the abolition of torture starve the fires; Holt acquits eleven in a row and the prosecutions die of embarrassment rather than enlightenment. Mohra, Salem's nineteen and its public penitence, Würzburg in 1749, Rouen's parliament pleading for one more execution — the decline is ragged, and the last flares come after the arguments are already lost. Hence the nineteenth-century coda: the ducking mob at Burton, the horse-shoes, the Lincolnshire witch-doctors, the murder of Renard. The roots survive; only the scale shrank.
My sharpest judgement is that Mackay knows where to aim and occasionally forgets. His thesis is stated outright: the malice of a few is a humiliating thought, but the credulity of millions is worse. His quarrel is with the audience, not the villains, and that is the right target — it is what makes the chapter still useful. But his confidence is period-bound. He flattens every strangeness into pathology (men persuaded they are teapots, cheerfully filed beside mountain mirages), and when he notes that the man who thinks himself a wolf now goes to the hospital instead of the stake, he treats the change of institution as the end of the matter and never asks whether it is mercy or relabelling. He is reading history from inside a century that believed it had finished with delusion.
What I most want a reader to carry away is not the body count but two small sentences buried in the mass. First, his observation that women who confessed to bearing the devil's children were never women who had actually been mothers — the fantasy only survives where no real memory contradicts it; the confessions are evidence about the confessors, never about the devil. Second, the detail that it became a common prayer among poor women that they might never live to grow old. That is the whole chapter compressed: not a bull, not a trial, but a quiet wish not to survive, because poverty plus age plus a woman's body had been made a capital offense. And read closely, the entire creed of demonology decodes the same way — the infant who needs five nurses and never grows fat is not a changeling, it is a failure-to-thrive child. Every article of the nightmare turns out to be a real grief misfiled. The lesson that outlives the witches is procedural: beware any charge that cannot be disproved, any evidence rule where denial confirms guilt, and any accusation whose chief virtue is that it attaches most easily to people nobody will defend.
Read The Witch Mania with these cards beside each passage.
Open in FeedLitraThe Slow Poisoners
How does this chapter trace the crime from England to France and Italy?
How The Slow Poisoners unfoldsAI-assisted
Opening: the Overbury case as gateway
The chapter begins by framing slow poisoning as a crime that antiquity knew only occasionally but that spread across Europe from the sixteenth century onward — alarming enough by Henry VIII's time that an act in his twenty-first year made it high treason punishable by boiling to death. Having sketched that growth curve, the author narrows to a single conspiracy: the 1613 murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower by Rochester and Lady Essex. The trial evidence has Overbury dosed with seven different poisons over six months, enough to kill several men, before corrosive sublimate finished him — though the author is careful to note that Weldon's account instead has him smothered with bedclothes. What the case really establishes is not the method but the outcome: James I swore a public imprecation against anyone who spared the guilty and then broke it, cutting short Sir Thomas Monson's trial because a dying man's speech might have touched the king, and pardoning the condemned Somersets after five years with an income of 4,000*l.* a year out of the forfeited estates. The law, in short, was overruled from above. The author adds the suspicion that James himself was later poisoned, and concedes that the secret binding him to Somerset is surmised and never proved.
Development: England to Italy, from individual crime to organised trade
From the Overbury affair the chapter moves outward, first to the mob killing of Dr. Lamb, which makes a second point about where punishment lands. Buckingham, the patron, suffered comparatively little; his reputed agent was recognised in Cheapside, dragged to St. Paul's Cross and beaten until every bone was broken, with Charles I arriving too late to do more than fine the city six hundred pounds. The same lopsidedness — the rope for the obscure supplier, impunity for the powerful employer — will return in France. The narrative then crosses to Italy, where the crime stops being episodic and becomes a trade. La Spara's Roman sisterhood and Tophania's "Manna of St. Nicholas" are credited with hundreds of deaths; Tophania's arsenic water was sold in strengths calculated to kill in a week, a month, or six months, and shipped in vials labelled as a saint's miraculous oil so that customs officers would pass them, while she changed names, lodged in monasteries, and ran the business at full scale from hiding. The author's emphasis here is on habituation rather than ignorance: Roman ladies kept poison bottles openly on the dressing-table beside the scent, and the Duke of Guise's captain of the guard refused the dagger as beneath an officer's honour yet cheerfully undertook to poison Gennaro Annese — a story, the author notes, told by the duke himself, an interested witness, just as the death tolls rest on Lebat and other contemporary reports that disagree about the poison's composition.
The turn: France, Brinvilliers, and exposure that spreads the crime
The chapter's pivot comes with the transmission of the trade into France, where Exili taught Sainte Croix, who taught Madame de Brinvilliers to murder her own family. The turn in the narrative is the accident of Sainte Croix's box, which exposes her: La Chaussée is broken on the wheel, Brinvilliers flees to England, is tricked back into custody by Desgrais, confesses, and is beheaded and burned. Here the author inverts the expected moral. Her conviction was publicised everywhere, and instead of deterring, it taught — the method being cheap and easy, readers copied it, and hundreds of poisonings followed. This is reinforced by the crime's own physics: small doses made a victim look as though he were merely wasting away, so there was no visible crime to prosecute and little fear of the scaffold, and people whom the risk of detection would have kept from pistol or dagger now poisoned over petty grudges. Between 1676 and 1682 French prisons filled with poisoning cases while other offences fell away.
Close: the Chambre Ardente and the failure of selective justice
The chapter ends with the official response and its collapse. Lavoisin and Lavigoreux — self-declared imitators of Spara and Tophania — sold poison under cover of midwifery and fortune-telling, and the Chambre Ardente was founded with sweeping powers to meet the emergency. But its reach ended where rank began. Dozens of humble accomplices were executed while the Duchess of Bouillon was released through influential friends, the Marshal de Luxembourg was never judged after fourteen months of proceedings, and the inquiry into Penautier was stifled. The closing argument returns to where the chapter opened: just as James I's pardon had taught onlookers that the crime was survivable with the right friends, the special court's selective impunity kept the French mania alive rather than ending it. The chapter thus closes not on the suppression of poisoning but on the explanation of its persistence — punishment that fell on the obscure and spared the protected could deter no one.
Key claims, with the lines that support them
Slow poisoning turned from an occasional crime of antiquity into a seventeenth-century European epidemic.
The author's marker for how alarming it had already become is legislation: an act in the twenty-first year of Henry VIII made poisoning high treason, punishable by being boiled to death. This chapter starts from this growth curve before narrowing to particular cases.
“Early in the sixteenth century the crime seems to have gradually increased, till in the seventeenth it spread over Europe like a pestilence.”
The Slow PoisonersRead in context →
The murder of Sir Thomas Overbury is presented as the gateway case that introduces the later poisoning craze in France and Italy.
On the trial evidence Overbury was given seven different poisons over six months in the Tower, enough to have killed many men, before corrosive sublimate finished him; the author notes that Weldon's version instead has him smothered with bedclothes. From this single conspiracy he moves outward to the continental mania fifty years later.
“A slight sketch of it will be a fitting introduction to the history of the poisoning mania, which was so prevalent in France and Italy fifty years later.”
The Slow PoisonersRead in context →
The outcome was settled by royal complicity rather than by law.
Having sworn a public imprecation against anyone who spared the guilty, James I broke it: Sir Thomas Monson's trial was cut short and he was released because a dying man's speech might have implicated the king, and the condemned Somersets were pardoned after five years and given an income of 4000l. a year out of the forfeited estates. The author concedes the secret that bound James to Somerset is only surmised, never proved.
“Already James had broken his oath.”
The Slow PoisonersRead in context →
3 more claims
Popular rage struck the small supplier, not the powerful man who employed him.
While Buckingham, the patron, suffered comparatively little, his reputed agent Dr. Lamb was recognised in Cheapside, dragged to St. Paul's Cross and beaten until every bone was broken; Charles I arrived too late and could only fine the city six hundred pounds. The same lopsidedness later reappears in France, where humble accomplices hanged and courtiers walked free.
“The popular fury, which broke with comparative harmlessness against his patron, was directed against this man, until he could not appear with safety in the streets of London.”
The Slow PoisonersRead in context →
In Italy it was custom rather than ignorance that made poisoning feel like an ordinary way of settling a quarrel.
Contemporary writers report that in the days of La Spara and La Tophania Roman ladies kept their poison bottles openly on the dressing-table beside the scent. The author's sharpest illustration is the Duke of Guise's captain of the guard, who refused the dagger as beneath an officer's honour yet cheerfully undertook to poison Gennaro Annese — a story told by the duke himself, so taken from an interested witness.
“From a very early period, it seems to have been looked upon in that country as a perfectly justifiable means of getting rid of an enemy.”
The Slow PoisonersRead in context →
Poison-selling grew into an organised trade with its own branding, graded doses and church protection.
Tophania's arsenic water was sold in strengths calculated to kill in a week, a month or six months, and shipped across Italy in vials labelled as a saint's miraculous oil so customs officers would let them pass; she changed names, lodged in monasteries, and kept the business running at full scale while in hiding. The author's death tolls, though, rest on Lebat and other contemporary reports, and accounts of the poison's composition differ.
“In process of time, poison-vending became a profitable trade.”
The Slow PoisonersRead in context →
How it works
The 3 mechanisms the chapter’s argument runs on.
Mechanism 1
Impunity above, the rope below
When punishment fell only on obscure suppliers while protected patrons bought their way out, onlookers learned the crime was survivable with the right friends, so the law stopped deterring anyone. The author traces this from James I's pardon of the Somersets to the stifled inquiry into Penautier, which he says kept the French mania alive.
Mechanism 2
Publicity teaches the method
A sensational trial broadcast not just the warning but the recipe, and since the method was cheap and easy, readers copied rather than recoiled. Hence the author's point that exposure multiplied poisoning instead of ending it: Brinvilliers' conviction was followed by hundreds using her method, including Lavoisin and Lavigoreux, self-declared imitators of Spara and Tophania.
Mechanism 3
Invisible means, trivial motives
Because small doses made a victim look as though he were simply wasting away, there was no visible crime to prosecute and so little fear of the scaffold. People whom the risk of detection would have kept from pistol or dagger therefore poisoned over petty grudges, and from 1676 to 1682 French prisons filled with poisoning cases while other offences fell away.
Common misreadings
Italians poisoned so freely because they were backward about medicine and did not grasp what they were doing.
What the author describes is habituation, not ignorance: once poisoning became customary it simply stopped registering as a crime, which is why an officer could think a dagger thrust dishonourable and a cup of poison unobjectionable. The tolerance was social; when authorities were roused they still punished the crime severely.
“From a very early period, it seems to have been looked upon in that country as a perfectly justifiable means of getting rid of an enemy.”
The Slow PoisonersRead in context →
Setting up a special court with sweeping powers — the Chambre Ardente — brought the poisoning wave under control.
Its reach ended where rank began, so it pressed on the poor and spared the powerful: the Duchess of Bouillon was released through influential friends and the Marshal de Luxembourg was never judged after fourteen months of proceedings, while dozens of humbler accomplices were executed. The author treats that selective impunity as the reason the crime went on rather than stopped.
“The escape of Penautier, and the wealthy Cardinal de Bonzy his employer, had the most pernicious effect.”
The Slow PoisonersRead in context →
Key concepts in The Slow Poisoners
- Slow poisoning
- Doses small enough that the victim seems to be wasting away naturally.
- Where it applies: Describes the method and its concealment, not the later mass craze.
- Popular imitativeness
- Exposure of a crime breeds copycats rather than deterrence. Crowds copy a crime once its details are widely publicised and admired.
- Where it applies: Mackay asserts it here; the proof is promised later in this chapter. Works where the method is easy, cheap and hard to detect; strong punishment of notable offenders can check it.
- Poisoning as a magical art
- Slow poisoning taught as a skill by pretended witches and sorcerers.
- Where it applies: Links the crime to occult pretenders, not to ordinary medicine.
- Fashionable murder as peccadillo
- When poisoning becomes customary, people stop feeling it as a crime at all.
- Where it applies: Describes social tolerance, not legal status; authorities still punished it harshly when roused.
- Aqua Tophania
- A tasteless arsenic solution sold in graded strengths so a victim died in a week, a month, or six months.
- Where it applies: Accounts of its exact composition differ among Hahnemann, Gagliardi and Garelli.
- Ecclesiastical sanctuary as shield
- Poisoners hid in convents, where church privilege blocked arrest for years.
- Where it applies: Held only while the secular ruler feared excommunication and the mob.
5 more concepts
- Confessional as first alarm
- In both Rome and France, priests, not police, first learned that wives were poisoning husbands.
- Where it applies: Clergy reported the scale of the crime but never the penitents' names.
- Manufactured rumour to turn the crowd
- Officials invented a story of poisoned wells so the mob that protected Tophania demanded her death.
- Where it applies: A tactic of government here, not a spontaneous delusion.
- Chambre Ardente
- The 'Burning Chamber', a special court Louis XIV set up with wide powers to try poisoners.
- Where it applies: Its reach stopped at wealthy courtiers, so it curbed the poor more than the powerful.
- Self-fulfilling prophecy of death
- Fortune-tellers predicted deaths and then supplied the poison that caused them.
- Where it applies: Depends on selling both the prophecy and the means; collapses once the trade is detected.
- Canonising the criminal
- The crowd treated an executed poisoner's ashes as healing relics.
- Where it applies: A folly of the multitude, not of the law or the church.
Reader’s notes on The Slow PoisonersAI reading companion
“Those found guilty of it were to be boiled to death.”
Read in context →A law answering secret cruelty with spectacular cruelty — the state borrows the poisoner's logic of slow death, only in public.
“for no other reason that the world could ever discover than the beauty of his person”
Read in context →Mackay's sly knife: he never accuses outright, he just leaves no other explanation standing.
“if friendship ever could exist between two such men”
Read in context →The whole tragedy in one aside — nothing here was ever friendship, only mutual leverage, which is why a single sentence of advice becomes a death warrant.
17 more notes
“he would expose his villany to the world”
Read in context →Overbury thinks he holds a hostage; he's actually naming his own price. Every threat he writes shortens his life.
“God’s curse light on me and my posterity for ever!”
Read in context →The king swears an oath he will break within months — and Mackay, unable to resist, cashes it in on the Stuarts' whole bloodline.
“To conceal old guilt it was necessary to incur new”
Read in context →The cleanest line in the chapter. Monson walks free not from mercy but because his dying words were too expensive.
“James granted him out of their revenues an income of 4000l. per annum!”
Read in context →The exclamation mark does the work. A convicted murderer pensioned off — one suspects the king was paying hush money, not showing clemency.
“lived under the same roof for months together without the interchange of a word”
Read in context →After all the poison, this is the detail that lands — the passion they killed for curdling into silence.
“ladies put poison-bottles on their dressing-tables as openly, and used them with as little scruple upon others, as modern dames use Eau de Cologne”
Read in context →Domesticating murder into toiletry is the chapter's real thesis: fashion, not wickedness, is what makes killing feel ordinary.
“but to poniard him, he said, would be disgraceful, and unbecoming an officer of the guards!”
Read in context →Honour survives intact as pure etiquette — he'll kill the man, he just won't kill him rudely.
“ate nothing for dinner that day but cabbage dressed with oil, which acting as an antidote, caused him to vomit profusely”
Read in context →History turning on a bowl of oily cabbage. The author loves these absurd hinges — and he's right that they're the real texture of the past.
“It was also the subject of general conversation in Rome that young widows were unusually abundant.”
Read in context →The best detective work here isn't forensic, it's gossip. A statistical anomaly noticed by idle talk before any authority.
“Taking a confession extorted by anguish on the rack at its true value (nothing at all), there is still sufficient evidence”
Read in context →A startling flash of evidentiary scruple from a writer otherwise happy to retail hearsay. He discounts the torture — then keeps the verdict anyway. Convenient.
“so that the poisoners had only to say whether they wanted their victims to die in a week, a month, or six months”
Read in context →Murder as a product line with delivery options. The horror is in the retail normalcy.
“she made them presents of it”
Read in context →Charity as the engine of mass murder — she saw herself as a benefactor of unhappy wives. The most chilling sentence so far, and told almost fondly.
“spread abroad a report that Tophania had poisoned all the wells and fountains of the city”
Read in context →The viceroy beats a mob with a lie, after beating a cardinal with a bread blockade. Note that the crowd's switch from saint to devil required no new fact — only a better rumor.
“she went round to the hospitals, and administered them to the sick poor in the soups which she brought in apparent charity”
Read in context →Charity reappears as the delivery vehicle. Twice now the costume of mercy is the instrument — that's the chapter's real discovery, not the arsenic.
“To be more certain still, she next poisoned herself!”
Read in context →The exclamation marks are doing a lot of work, but this one earns it: a methodical empiricist who happens to be a monster. She'd have made a fine pharmacologist.
“La Brinvilliers poisoned him one day, and Sainte Croix gave him an antidote the next.”
Read in context →A grotesque comedy — the husband as a tug-of-war rope between two lovers' incompatible interests. He survives by being useful to one of them.
“One day, the mask slipped off, and the miserable wretch perished in his crimes.”
Read in context →The literal mask slipping, for a man the text has just called amiable and witty with two fierce passions hidden beneath. The author doesn't point at the pun; he doesn't need to.
A reader’s takeAI reading companion
Poisonings spread from secret crime through fashion into epidemic
Mackay's chapter on the slow poisoners runs a single argument from end to end, and it is not the one the title promises. It opens with a law — poisoners to be boiled to death — and in that opening note you can already hear the whole shape: the state answering secret cruelty with spectacular cruelty, borrowing the poisoner's logic of prolonged dying and only moving it into public view. From there the chapter travels, England to Italy to France, and in each country the same thing happens: a private crime becomes a fashion, the fashion becomes an epidemic, and the law arrives late, loudly, and selectively.
The Overbury affair is the right place to begin because it is the case in which nobody is clean. Mackay's method shows itself immediately — he rarely accuses, he simply removes every alternative explanation and leaves the reader alone with the obvious one. Rochester rises for no discoverable reason but the beauty of his person; the friendship that frames the murder was never friendship but mutual leverage, which is exactly why one sentence of unwanted advice can become a death warrant. Overbury believes his letters make him a hostage-holder; in fact each threat names his own price and shortens his life. Then the agents hang and the principals are pardoned, and the chapter's quietest and cleanest line does the real work: to conceal old guilt it was necessary to incur new. Monson walks free not from mercy but because his dying words would have cost too much, and a convicted murderer draws four thousand a year out of his victim's estate. That is not clemency, it is hush money, and the exclamation mark Mackay puts on the figure is the only comment he needs. The king swears God's curse on himself and his posterity, breaks the oath within months, and the author — unable to resist — cashes the oath in against the whole Stuart line. The sequel is the detail that lands hardest: two people who killed for a passion, afterward living under one roof for months without exchanging a word.
Continue reading
Abroad, the scale changes but the mechanism does not, and the mechanism is the chapter's real thesis: fashion, not wickedness, is what makes killing feel ordinary. Ladies set poison-bottles on dressing-tables as freely as modern women set out Eau de Cologne. La Spara's Roman sisterhood and Tophania's Manna of St. Nicholas kill by the hundred, and horror collapses into retail normalcy — customers simply specified whether death should arrive in a week, a month, or six months. Murder acquires a product line with delivery options, and twice over it travels in the costume of mercy: Tophania makes presents of her liquid to unhappy wives and carries it to the sick poor in charitable soups. That is the chapter's actual discovery, not the arsenic — that benevolence is the most efficient vehicle a poisoner ever found, and that she could believe herself a benefactor while doing it. She even poisons herself to calibrate the dose: a methodical empiricist who happens to be a monster, and who in another century would have made a respectable pharmacologist.
The detection, meanwhile, is almost never forensic. Rome notices the plague through gossip — young widows had become unusually abundant — a statistical anomaly spotted by idle talk long before any authority stirred. France's exposure turns on a box left behind at a death and on a bowl of cabbage dressed in oil that made a man vomit up his dose; Mackay loves these absurd hinges, and he is right that they are the true texture of the past, not its official record. The same comedy runs through the Brinvilliers household, where the husband survives only as a tug-of-war rope — poisoned on one day by his wife, dosed with an antidote on the next by her lover, kept alive because he remained useful to one of them. Honour, where it appears, survives purely as etiquette: the officer who will cheerfully poison a man but finds the dagger disgraceful and unbecoming the guards.
Two cracks in Mackay's own performance are worth marking, because the sharp reader should not be charmed out of noticing them. He pauses to take a confession extorted on the rack at its true value — nothing at all — a startling flash of evidentiary scruple from a writer otherwise glad to retail rumour; and then he keeps the verdict anyway. Convenient. And he shows, without quite admitting it, how little truth the crowd requires: the Naples mob flips Tophania from saint to devil with no new fact at all, only a better rumour planted by a viceroy who had already beaten a cardinal with a bread blockade. The lie about poisoned wells works precisely because the public appetite was for a story, not evidence.
The ending is the most instructive part, and it closes the circle the opening law began. Brinvilliers is tricked back across the Channel by a disguised Desgrais, confesses, is beheaded and burned; La Chaussée is broken on the wheel. And the punishment advertises the crime. Publicity breeds imitators — Lavoisin and Lavigoreux immediately set up shop behind midwifery and fortune-telling — so the Chambre Ardente is founded in response, and then the titled suspects quietly escape its reach, which prolongs the mania rather than ending it. The arc is exact: spectacular justice for the servants, pensions and pardons for the principals, and a credulous public that will believe anything except that its betters are guilty.
What I would tell the reader is this. Do not read the chapter as a parade of grotesques; read it as an account of how an atrocity becomes a convenience. Poison spread not because Europe suddenly bred monsters but because it was quiet, deniable, purchasable, fashionable, and — crucially — because the law punished theatrically downward while bargaining discreetly upward. The boiling cauldron and the four-thousand-a-year pension are the same policy seen from two ends. And the costume of charity, worn twice to lethal effect, is the warning that outlasts the arsenic: the delusion here is not that people believed in poison, but that they could not believe a benefactor, a friend, or a king capable of administering it.
Read The Slow Poisoners with these cards beside each passage.
Open in FeedLitraHaunted Houses
Why did fear persist for years after the Aix-la-Chapelle cause was exposed?
How Haunted Houses unfoldsAI-assisted
Opening — the mild survivor. Mackay begins by placing haunted houses at the tail end of a larger subject: belief in them is the harmless residue of the witch creed, what remains after the gallows and the stake have gone. But the opening refuses to let that mildness become complacency. He immediately produces a count — hundreds of houses standing empty in England, hundreds more in France and Germany, dwellings nobody will rent at any price — so that the chapter's premise is not "here is a quaint old error" but "here is a live one, and the boast about the advance of reason is hollow." Having set that stake, he supplies his first explanatory key, the smallest one: a trivial physical fact dressed up as a spirit. At Aix-la-Chapelle a broken latch and a cracked pane let the wind swing a door; five years of terror and a ruinous forced sale went by before a new owner thought to send for a glazier — and the house needed two or three more years to recover its name. In the case Scott reports, a mansion's knocking was a rat struggling in an old trap and dropping the lid. The moral is pointed: patient physical inquiry dissolves these cases, while prayer and exorcism accomplish nothing at all. Fear's work is to stop anyone from looking closely.
Development — from accident to design. Accident, however, explains only the cases nobody investigated. The chapter's real engine is human roguery, and Mackay turns to it by asking who profits. Six Carthusian monks worked shrieks, coloured lights and a pea-green spectre until Saint Louis signed over the palace of Vauvert in 1259 — fraud for property. At Woodstock in 1649 the servant "Giles Sharp," in fact the royalist Joseph Collins, used trap-doors and secret passages to drive the parliamentary commissioners out — fraud for politics. At Tours in 1580 Gilles Blacre got his lease annulled on the plea that the house was infested, though a higher court in Paris afterwards reinstated it on a technical point — fraud for escape from a bargain. Profit, revenge, politics: the lasting hauntings are manufactured, and each has a living beneficiary.
The turn — the test that unmasks. From motive Mackay moves to method of proof, and here the chapter finds its sharpest instrument: because the effects depend on a hidden hand, they fall silent the moment serious witnesses control the conditions. At Tedworth the drumming had spread the house's fame far and wide, yet it stopped for the whole of the royal commissioners' visit and resumed once they had gone; the gipsy drummer boasted in jail of causing it and was transported as a witch. Cock Lane gives the full pattern. Parsons, in debt and resentful of Kent, staged his daughter's ghost — Fanny, accusing Kent of poisoning her; crowds came, admission was charged, and curiosity was converted into gate money that rewarded the trick and kept it running. Then came the test: the girl's hands held outside the bedclothes, the company waiting in the vault, the ghost summoned to knock and scratch and doing neither. Parsons was convicted of conspiracy. Mackay is careful about the alibi offered in such moments — the plea that the spirit happens to be absent is not an excuse but the tell-tale sign of trickery.
Close — the law improved, the mind unchanged. The chapter ends on the audience rather than the impostors, and on how crude the successful devices were. Anne Robinson at Stockwell balanced china so it must fall and worked objects with horse-hairs, merely to empty the house for an intrigue with her lover. At Baldarroch in 1838 two servant lasses loosened chimney bricks and set dishes where they were bound to topple; questioned and lodged in the county gaol, they took the noises with them, and the hauntings ceased at once. Such contrivances pass not on their merits but because people copy one another's belief: once a few vouch for the marvel, the crowd follows instead of examining. From this Mackay draws his closing distinction, and it is a deliberately deflating one. Parsons, the ingenious Anne Robinson and the Baldarroch girls would all have hanged as witches two centuries earlier; now they were merely imprisoned as cheats. What has improved is the statute book, not the public mind — folly and credulity are as great as ever. And striking cruel laws off the books is only the first step. The ghosts that remain, he charges at the last, are the fault of lawgivers who never troubled to educate the people; the real remedy is the direct teaching of every child.
Key claims, with the lines that support them
Belief in haunted houses was still thriving in nineteenth-century Europe, which makes boasts about the advance of reason hollow.
The author points to hundreds of houses in England, and hundreds more in France and Germany, standing empty under a reputation for being haunted—dwellings nobody will rent at any price.
“There are many such houses in London; and if any vain boaster of the march of intellect would but take the trouble to find them out and count them, he would be convinced that intellect must yet make some enormous strides before such old superstitions can be eradicated.”
Haunted HousesRead in context →
Patient physical inquiry clears up these hauntings, whereas prayer and exorcism accomplish nothing.
At Aix-la-Chapelle a broken latch and a cracked pane let the wind swing a door; five years of terror and a ruinous forced sale had passed before a new owner simply sent for a glazier, and the house needed two or three years more to recover its name. In a case reported by Scott, a family mansion's knocking turned out to be a rat struggling in an old trap and letting the lid fall.
“The new proprietor lost no time in sending for a glazier, and the mysterious noises ceased for ever.”
Haunted HousesRead in context →
Having established that some cases are mere accidents, the author argues that the lasting ones are manufactured frauds serving profit, revenge or politics.
Six Carthusian monks staged shrieks, coloured lights and a pea-green spectre until Saint Louis signed the palace of Vauvert over to them in 1259; at Woodstock in 1649 the servant 'Giles Sharp'—actually the royalist Joseph Collins—used trap-doors and secret passages to drive out the parliamentary commissioners; and at Tours in 1580 Gilles Blacre got his lease annulled on the ground that the house was infested, though a higher court in Paris later reinstated it on a technical point.
“A deed was forthwith drawn up, the royal sign-manual was affixed to it, and the palace of Vauvert became the property of the monks of St. Bruno.”
Haunted HousesRead in context →
3 more claims
The clearest proof of a human hand is that the phenomena fall silent as soon as they are properly watched.
At Tedworth the drumming stopped for the whole of the royal commissioners' visit and started again once they left; in Cock Lane, when the girl's hands were held outside the bedclothes and the company waited in the vault, the ghost summoned to knock and scratch did neither.
“it was summoned to knock, but it knocked not; it was summoned to scratch, but it scratched not;”
Haunted HousesRead in context →
Turning from motive to the audience, the author holds that these tricks succeed not on their merits but because people copy one another's belief.
The devices were laughably crude: Anne Robinson at Stockwell balanced china so it would fall and worked objects with horse-hairs, simply to empty the house for an intrigue with her lover; at Baldarroch in 1838 two servant girls loosened chimney bricks and set dishes where they must topple, and when they were questioned and put in the county gaol the noises stopped at once.
“That any contrivance so clumsy could have deceived any body cannot fail to excite our wonder.”
Haunted HousesRead in context →
What has actually improved, the author concludes, is the law rather than the public mind—and the ghosts that remain are the fault of rulers who never educated the people.
He observes that Parsons of Cock Lane, the ingenious Anne Robinson and the Baldarroch girls would all have been hanged as witches two centuries earlier but were now merely imprisoned as cheats, while granting that folly and credulity are as great as ever; striking cruel statutes off the books, he adds, is only the first step, and the real remedy is directly teaching every child.
“Thus it is pleasant to reflect, that though there may be as much folly and credulity in the world as ever in one class of society, there is more wisdom and mercy in another than ever were known before.”
Haunted HousesRead in context →
How it works
The 3 mechanisms the chapter’s argument runs on.
Mechanism 1
Small cause, big ghost
A trivial physical fact—a latch that no longer catches, a rat shifting a trap-door—makes an odd noise; fear stops anyone from looking closely, so the noise is credited to spirits and the house empties. Once someone investigates calmly, the mystery ends.
Mechanism 2
Wonders quit under watch
Because the effects depend on a hidden human hand, they vanish the moment serious witnesses control the conditions, and return when the watch is lifted. The excuse that the spirit happens to be absent is itself the tell-tale sign of trickery.
Mechanism 3
Imitation plus gate money
Once a few people vouch for the marvel, the crowd follows rather than examining evidence, so even a clumsy contrivance passes. The impostor then turns that curiosity into paid admission, which rewards the fraud and keeps it running.
Common misreadings
Since a swinging door or a trapped rat explains the famous cases, every haunted house must have some innocent natural cause behind it.
The author separates two kinds of case and treats deliberate human roguery as the general rule for houses that keep a haunted name: at Vauvert, Woodstock and Tours there was a living beneficiary who gained property, political advantage or release from a lease. The accident explanation covers only those cases where nobody with a steady mind bothered to look.
“A deed was forthwith drawn up, the royal sign-manual was affixed to it, and the palace of Vauvert became the property of the monks of St. Bruno.”
Haunted HousesRead in context →
The fact that these impostors were caught and tried shows the nineteenth-century public had grown too clever to be fooled.
By the author's own reckoning the public was still as foolish and credulous as before—hundreds of houses sat empty on rumour alone—and what changed was the penalty: the same tricksters who would once have gone to the gallows as witches were now jailed as cheats, which is a measure of the law's mercy, not of popular wisdom.
“Thus it is pleasant to reflect, that though there may be as much folly and credulity in the world as ever in one class of society, there is more wisdom and mercy in another than ever were known before.”
Haunted HousesRead in context →
Key concepts in Haunted Houses
- Remnant of the witch creed
- Haunted-house belief as the leftover, bloodless tail of witchcraft panic — a folly rather than a madness.
- Where it applies: Unlike other witch-beliefs it sent almost nobody to stake or gibbet, so its harm is economic and social, not lethal.
- Trifling cause uninvestigated
- A tiny physical fact — a broken latch, a trapped rat — grows into a ghost because nobody with a vigorous mind looks into it.
- Where it applies: Applies where investigation is possible; it does not explain cases that are deliberate fraud.
- Roguery of living men
- Most lasting haunted reputations are manufactured by people who gain property, revenge or amusement from the terror.
- Where it applies: Mackay states this as the general rule, distinguishing it from accidental cases.
- Haunted house as legal ground
- French courts actually treated infestation by evil spirits as a reason to annul a lease.
- Where it applies: Tours 1580 was reversed only on procedural grounds; Bourdeaux 1595 annulled the lease outright.
- Haunted house imposture
- Noises and moving objects staged by humans but credited to spirits.
- Where it applies: Applies where a human beneficiary and a controllable test both exist.
- Deferred proof
- The wonder always excuses its absence whenever serious witnesses watch.
- Where it applies: Recognisable only when an independent test is actually attempted.
5 more concepts
- Popular imitativeness
- Once a few lead in an absurdity, crowds follow like sheep over a stile.
- Where it applies: Describes the spread of belief, not its origin.
- Profiting from the delusion
- The impostor converts public curiosity into entrance fees.
- Where it applies: Motive can be revenge first, money second.
- Competitive credulity
- Witnesses compete to report ever more marvellous things, inflating a rumour as it travels.
- Where it applies: Describes the amplification of a panic, not its original cause.
- Shame of recanting belief
- People who publicly affirmed the supernatural resist the simple explanation rather than admit being fooled.
- Where it applies: Applies to those already committed in public, not to quiet observers.
- Mercy as mark of progress
- Mackay's test of improvement: the same tricksters are now jailed as vagabonds instead of hanged as witches.
- Where it applies: Measures the law's advance, not any decline in popular folly.
Reader’s notes on Haunted HousesAI reading companion
“he would be convinced that intellect must yet make some enormous strides before such old superstitions can be eradicated”
Read in context →Mackay's favorite posture: counting haunted houses as a crude metric of national stupidity. The confidence is bracing and a little smug — he never asks why the count stays stable.
“it has sent no wretches to the stake or the gibbet, and but a few to the pillory only”
Read in context →The moral accounting is body-count based. A delusion gets graded harmless because it killed nobody — telling that this is his only scale.
“The latch of the door was broken, so that it could not be fastened, and it swung chiefly upon the bottom hinge”
Read in context →Five years of terror, two inches of swinging door. The deflation is the whole essay in miniature — and note the fix is a glazier, not a priest.
16 more notes
“many persons, even then, would always avoid passing it, if they could reach their destination by any other street”
Read in context →The best line here. Explanation doesn't dissolve fear; it just makes people embarrassed about it. Mackay reports this without noticing it undercuts his thesis.
“but their modesty was so excessive that they were ashamed to ask the king for a grant of it in due form”
Read in context →The driest sentence in the chapter. He lets the monks' own piety do the indicting.
“the green ghost (so said the monks) was laid at rest for ever under the waves of the Red Sea”
Read in context →Same Red Sea the Aix priest invoked uselessly. Here it works — because the exorcists wrote the script. Nice quiet rhyme between the two stories.
“the bricks were observed to detach themselves from the wall, and fall into the streets upon the heads of those who had not said their paternoster”
Read in context →A haunting with a theological targeting system. The detail is too convenient — it's an alibi dressed as a marvel, and the crowd supplied it.
“on the twelfth filled their beds so full of pewter platters that they could not get into them”
Read in context →The day-by-day escalation reads like a comic serial. Sharp was pacing a performance, and Mackay's calendar form preserves the showmanship.
“he knew every hole and corner of the place, and the numerous trap-doors and secret passages”
Read in context →The reveal lands because the commissioners' zeal made them unable to imagine a royalist among them. Ideology as blindfold, not superstition.
“perhaps the demon was not willing to give so public a testimony of those transactions which might possibly convince those who he had rather should continue in unbelief”
Read in context →Glanvil inventing an unfalsifiable excuse in real time. Mackay just quotes it and steps back — the most efficient demolition in the chapter.
“seven or eight of these devils in the shape of men, who, as soon as a gun was fired, would shuffle away into an arbour”
Read in context →Devils that flinch at gunfire and hide in shrubbery. Mompesson narrates his own exposure and can't hear it.
“I have done it; I have thus plagued him; and he shall never be quiet until he hath made me satisfaction for taking away my drum.”
Read in context →A boast in gaol gets heard as a confession of witchcraft. The man claims human revenge; the court hears sorcery. Same sentence, two universes.
“by raising storms and affrighting the seamen, it was said;”
Read in context →Glanvil's own hedge — "it was said" — doing the work his argument can't. The credulous always leave a little trapdoor.
“afraid to doubt and ashamed to believe”
Read in context →The finest phrase so far. That's the exact posture of the educated witness in every panic — paralysed between two embarrassments.
“How many clergymen are there in this room?”—“Three.” “How many negroes?”—“Two.”
Read in context →They test the ghost with facts everyone in the room already knows — the one question type that can't disprove a child in the bed. The rigour is theatre.
“he not only had his revenge, but he made a profit out of it”
Read in context →The admission fee is the tell. Grief-fraud becomes a business, and Mackay lets the ledger do the debunking.
“it was summoned to knock, but it knocked not; it was summoned to scratch, but it scratched not”
Read in context →He borrows scriptural cadence to stage an anticlimax. The liturgical rhythm makes the silence funnier.
“they did not like to stultify themselves by confessing that they had been deceived”
Read in context →Here's the chapter's real engine: delusion survives not on evidence but on the cost of retracting in public. Sunk pride, centuries before the term.
“all objects thus thrown about by the devil lost their specific gravity, and could harm nobody”
Read in context →The belief grows its own immune system — a rule explaining why the miracle never leaves a bruise. Unfalsifiable by design.
A reader’s takeAI reading companion
Proving frauds real doesn't prove ignorance made people believe them
The chapter is Mackay at his most entertaining and least self-aware. He opens by filing haunted houses as the witch creed's harmless residue — harmless because, as he carefully notes, it has sent nobody to the stake and only a few to the pillory — and then marches through a gallery of exposures: the Parisian palace of Vauvert won by monks whose modesty forbade them to petition the king outright; the Woodstock commissioners routed by Joseph Collins, who knew the trap-doors; Mompesson's Tedworth drummer, with devils that hid in shrubbery when a gun went off; the Cock Lane ghost, where Parsons sold tickets to his daughter's knocking and the vault test produced a magnificent silence; and the Baldarroch affair of 1838, undone by two servant lasses. The structure is deliberate — fraud after fraud, each deflated to its mechanism — and the deflations are genuinely fine: five years of terror in one street resolved by a broken latch and a bottom hinge, with a glazier rather than a priest as the cure.
What I saw through is the gap between what Mackay demonstrates and what he claims to demonstrate. His stated thesis is ignorance: the count of haunted houses measures national stupidity, and neglected public education explains the remainder. But his own best evidence points elsewhere. The broken-latch street stayed avoided after the explanation — people did not stop fearing it, they merely became embarrassed about fearing it, and he records this without noticing it refutes him. Cock Lane's believers held on because "they did not like to stultify themselves by confessing that they had been deceived" — sunk pride, not want of schooling, and that is the chapter's real engine. The Woodstock commissioners were blinded not by superstition but by ideology: their zeal made a royalist among them unthinkable. Credulity here is a social cost structure, not an information deficit; and the beliefs defend themselves with purpose-built machinery — bricks that strike only those who skipped their paternoster, objects that lose specific gravity so the devil never leaves a bruise, Glanvil's demon declining to testify lest it convince the wrong people, and his own quiet hedge, "it was said." Unfalsifiable by design, every time.
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My sharpest judgement: Mackay's instrument is better than his diagnosis. He is superb when he simply quotes and steps back — Glanvil improvising an alibi, Mompesson narrating his own exposure, the gipsy drummer boasting of human revenge while the court hears sorcery in the identical sentence. He is weakest when he moralises, because his only scale is the body count, and grading a delusion harmless for killing nobody misses that Cock Lane nearly hanged an innocent man and that fraud turned a profit the whole time. The admission fee is the tell he never fully presses: these were businesses.
To the reader: take the phrase "afraid to doubt and ashamed to believe" as the chapter's true center of gravity. That paralysis between two embarrassments, not ignorance, is what keeps hauntings in business — then and now. Notice also that the ghost-testing in every episode is theatre: the room asks the spirit how many clergymen are present, a fact everyone already knows, the one question type that cannot catch a child in a bed. When you meet a modern panic, ask not whether people have been educated but what it would cost them publicly to retract, and whether the test being run could possibly come out the other way. Mackay gives you the tools to ask; he just points them at the wrong target.
Read Haunted Houses with these cards beside each passage.
Open in FeedLitraPopular Follies of Great Cities
Why does Mackay call these follies "harmless" while noting real costs?
How Popular Follies of Great Cities unfoldsAI-assisted
Opening: a defense of the cheerful observer. Mackay begins not with examples but with a posture. He contrasts two ways of walking through a great city: the "weeping philosopher," who hunts out miseries in order to be pathetic over them and whose tears blind him to remedies, and the observer whose sympathies are "hospitable enough to embrace all his kind" and who can note the "humble wit or grotesque peculiarities" of mechanic, beggar and urchin without sneering. The claim is pointed — "the man of no tears is the truest philanthropist" — and it does double duty as a disclaimer: so many pens have already catalogued the crimes and miseries of the multitude that this chapter will stay on the lighter side, seeking only "the harmless follies and whimsies of the poor." The epigraph from Béranger has already set the key, and the opening also plants the book's larger thesis in miniature: these phrases spread "no one knows how," pervade the whole population in a few hours, and then die as abruptly — crowd contagion in a harmless register.
Development: a chronological parade of slang phrases. The body is essentially a catalogue, arranged as a dynastic succession in which each phrase "drove its predecessor from its place" before being "hurled from its pre-eminence" in turn. Quoz comes first and establishes the template Mackay reuses throughout: the phrase is infinitely elastic, serving as incredulity, refusal, mockery and the universal answer to every question, and it ends up chalked on every wall. Then "What a shocking bad hat!" — here he can supply an origin, the contested Southwark election and the hatter-candidate who bribed voters with new hats, and he notes the cruelty inside the fun, the irritable man whose hat is flung into the gutter, the poor man who buys a hat he cannot afford to escape exposure. "Hookey Walker," reduced to "Walker!", and the wholly unaccountable "There he goes with his eye out!" follow briefly; "Has your mother sold her mangle?" fails because it could not be applied to older people — a small analytic touch, as Mackay keeps asking why some phrases catch and others do not.
The set pieces. The catalogue widens for three phrases given full treatment. "Flare up!", born of the Reform riots and the burning of Bristol, becomes "the most comprehensive phrase in the English language," and Mackay lingers on the drunkard who, intellect sunk to the level of the brute's, clings to humanity "by the one last link of the popular cry" — then on the speculator who founded a weekly newspaper on the phrase and, building on sand, was washed away with it. "Does your mother know you're out?" is read as socially useful, puncturing swaggering youths with false whiskers, and illustrated by the ducal heir who took a cabman to the magistrates for the insult and was fined-for-ignorance's sake. "Who are you?" gets two anecdotes, the pickpocket caught mid-theft and the judge whose deadpan use of the phrase from the bench convulsed the court and bought the saying a renewed lease of popularity.
The turn: songs, mischief, and a satirical narrator. Roughly midway Mackay breaks the sequence to note that slang and song alternate rather than run in unbroken line — "when the people were in the mood for music, slang advanced its claims to no purpose." The second half is thus musical and physical: the year-long plague of "Cherry ripe!", the turn to practical mischief under "Tommy and Jerry" (knocking down the watchmen, nights in the watch-house, rows in St. Giles's), the thumb-to-nose gesture, and the six months of "The Sea, the Sea!" Here he introduces his best device, an imaginary foreign philosopher who, judging England by its ears alone, deduces national naval supremacy from a street chorus. The device returns for the climax, "Jim Crow," where the same theorist infers boundless English benevolence toward Africa from the popularity of a blackface song — a deliberately hollow conclusion, aimed at English self-congratulation over abolition, and the chapter's sharpest irony.
Close. The ending circles back to the opening posture. These whimsies arise when "no riot, no execution, no murder, no balloon" disturbs the common mind; they are the means by which the mass unconsciously lightens the load of care. The wise man may smile, but will not withhold sympathy: "if they cannot be happy, at least let them be merry." The chapter then closes where it began, on Béranger, with the gaudriole as the thing that restores gaiety to a saddened people — framing the whole catalogue as indulgent comedy rather than indictment, a deliberately gentle interlude among the book's graver delusions.
Key claims, with the lines that support them
A street catchphrase can sweep an entire city with no discoverable author or starting place, and then serve as the answer to any question whatsoever.
The author traces "Quoz", which nobody could source, yet which signalled disbelief, refusal, mockery and the dismissal of an argument, filled every alehouse and street corner, and was chalked on walls for miles; "Who are you?" likewise was unheard one day and everywhere the next, used by the insolent to offend, the ignorant to dodge a question, and jokers to raise a laugh.
“It seems applicable to every circumstance, and is the universal answer to every question;”
Popular Follies of Great CitiesRead in context →
Not every craze is a mystery, though: some can be traced to a specific political incident, which qualifies the picture of fads as sourceless.
The author sets these against the obscure cases. "What a shocking bad hat!" came from a contested Southwark election where a hatter standing for office offered voters new hats as disguised bribes, and his opponents turned the line into an election-day chant that then spread over London; "Flare up!" came from the Reform riots in which Bristol was half burned, and grew into the most all-purpose phrase in the language.
“The origin of this singular saying, which made fun for the metropolis for months, is not involved in the same obscurity as that which shrouds the origin of Quoz and some others.”
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Songs compete with slang for the crowd's attention, and a meaningless chorus can own a city's ears for months purely through catchy performance and imitation.
The author notes the two fashions alternate rather than overlap — "Cherry ripe!" plagued London for a year and "The Sea, the Sea!" for six months, crowding slang out while they lasted. The clearest case is "Jim Crow": an American actor sang it in costume with grotesque gestures and a whirl at each verse's end, and the town copied him at once, street singers blackening their faces and the dance appearing on market nights in every main thoroughfare.
“It took the taste of the town immediately, and for months the ears of orderly people were stunned by the senseless chorus—”
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2 more claims
Reading a nation's character or motives off its passing fashions yields theories that sound convincing and are ridiculous.
The author runs the experiment twice with an imaginary visiting philosopher. Hearing everyone sing "The Sea, the Sea!", the visitor concludes the English are invincible at sea because they think of nothing else; hearing "Jim Crow" and seeing little figures of him on hearths, the same visitor concludes that England's boundless sympathy for enslaved Africans makes the crowd keep a memento of them in sight. Both inferences follow smoothly from the evidence of the ears and both are absurd.
“Jim Crow is the representative of that injured race, and as such is the idol of your populace!”
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The right posture toward these follies is amused tolerance rather than lament — which is why the chapter looks for fun instead of misery in the first place.
The author argues at the outset that the tearless observer helps the poor more than the weeping one, since grief blurs the eyesight needed to see remedies, just as the best physician keeps a cheerful face. He closes by calling the fads harmless devices by which the mass lightens the weight of its cares, and endorses Beranger's refrain that what gives a saddened people back its gaiety is a bit of broad fun.
“The wise man, even though he smile at them, will not altogether withhold his sympathy, and will say, “Let them enjoy their slang phrases and their choruses if they will; and if they cannot be happy, at least let them be merry.” To the Englishman, as well as to the Frenchman of whom Beranger sings, there may be some comfort in so small a thing as a song, and we may own with him that”
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How it works
The 3 mechanisms the chapter’s argument runs on.
Mechanism 1
Empty words fit everything
A catchword carries almost no fixed meaning, so tone alone supplies the sense: drawled with a sneer it means disbelief, barked at a stranger it means mockery, muttered at a request it means refusal. Because it fits every occasion, everyone can use it, and that universal usability is what makes it spread.
Mechanism 2
Copying by earshot
Nobody decides to adopt the phrase; people repeat what they just heard a neighbour shout. Passed along by errand boys, drivers and tap-room idlers, and chalked on walls to be read by the next passer-by, it can cross a whole city within hours while its starting point stays unknown.
Mechanism 3
Why each craze dies
The same sound heard everywhere turns monotonous, so the crowd tires of it and eventually finds it low even by its own standards; it is left to small boys and then displaced by a successor. Anyone who treats the fad as durable is building on sand, as the weekly paper named after "Flare up!" discovered.
Common misreadings
The Jim Crow craze shows that ordinary Londoners genuinely sympathized with enslaved Africans.
That reading is the author's joke at the expense of his invented philosopher, not his own account of the public mood. What he actually describes is a vile piece of doggerel adopted for its costumed, whirling stage antics and copied by street singers who blacked their faces for effect — a fashion in entertainment, from which nothing about English motives can be read.
“Jim Crow is the representative of that injured race, and as such is the idol of your populace!”
Popular Follies of Great CitiesRead in context →
Calling these fads "harmless follies" means nobody was hurt by them.
"Harmless" marks them off from riots, executions and ruinous manias, not from all cost. In the same chapter, men whose purses could ill afford it bought hats early to escape the "shocking bad hat" shout, irritable victims had their hats snatched into the gutter, and a cab driver was fined after aiming "does your mother know you're out?" at a duke's heir.
“The wise man, even though he smile at them, will not altogether withhold his sympathy, and will say, “Let them enjoy their slang phrases and their choruses if they will; and if they cannot be happy, at least let them be merry.” To the Englishman, as well as to the Frenchman of whom Beranger sings, there may be some comfort in so small a thing as a song, and we may own with him that”
Popular Follies of Great CitiesRead in context →
Key concepts in Popular Follies of Great Cities
- Popular imitativeness
- The crowd's reflex of copying whatever phrase or tune its neighbours are already repeating. The crowd's reflex copying of a catchy performance until a whole city repeats it.
- Where it applies: Here it drives harmless street fashions rather than financial ruin. Describes contagious imitation of harmless fads, not profit-driven manias.
- Favourite slang phrase of the day
- A catchword that briefly serves as the universal answer to anything, purely because everyone else is saying it.
- Where it applies: Its life is months at most; meaning matters less than sound.
- Evanescence of slang
- The rule that each craze phrase is driven out by a successor and never revived.
- Where it applies: "Flare up" survives only as ordinary speech, not as slang.
- Cheerful philanthropist
- Mackay's claim that the tearless observer helps the poor more than the weeping one.
- Where it applies: A stance on how to observe folly, not a denial that misery exists.
- Harmless follies of the mass
- City fads that serve as relief valves rather than destructive delusions.
- Where it applies: Applies where no riot, execution, or murder is driving the excitement.
- Philosophic theorist's false inference
- An outsider builds a grand national theory from a passing craze and gets it comically wrong.
- Where it applies: A satirical device about reading character from fads, not a claim about actual English motives.
0 more concepts
Reader’s notes on Popular Follies of Great CitiesAI reading companion
“the man of no tears is the truest philanthropist”
Read in context →A neat defense of his own cheerful method — and a convenient one. It licenses him to look away from misery for a whole chapter while claiming moral high ground.
“every wall for miles around was chalked with it”
Read in context →Chalk is the era's share button. The madness of crowds needs a cheap replication medium, and Mackay keeps noticing the medium without naming it.
“bribing them without letting them perceive that they were bribed”
Read in context →The one phrase with a traceable origin turns out to be born of corruption — and the mob's mockery is actually accurate political memory, not nonsense.
8 more notes
“Many a nervous poor man, whose purse could but ill spare the outlay”
Read in context →Here the harmless fun draws blood. A joke that costs the poorest a hat is a tax, and he records it in a subordinate clause before moving on.
“he clung to humanity by the one last link of the popular cry”
Read in context →Suddenly the mock-ethnography becomes something close to tenderness. Slang as the last proof of citizenship in a man who has lost everything else.
“established a weekly newspaper under its name”
Read in context →The first recorded case of monetizing a meme and getting caught by its half-life. Delightfully modern failure.
“offended justice fined him for his mistake”
Read in context →Fined for not recognizing a lord. Mackay reports it deadpan, but the chapter's only legal punishment falls on a cabman for insufficient deference.
“Who are you?” said the judge, looking suddenly up”
Read in context →The best scene in the chapter — the slang climbs from gutter to bench, and the prisoners read it as mercy. Crowd language briefly becomes law.
“an American actor introduced a vile song called “Jim Crow.”
Read in context →He calls it vile for being noise, not for what it is. Children blacking their faces to eat passes without a flicker of the moral alarm he spends freely elsewhere.
“Jim Crow is the representative of that injured race”
Read in context →The imaginary philosopher is Mackay's safe-conduct: he can voice the savage irony about England's cheap abolitionism while never owning it himself.
“if they cannot be happy, at least let them be merry”
Read in context →Kind on the surface, resigned underneath. Merriment is offered precisely because happiness isn't on the table — and he never asks why not.
A reader’s takeAI reading companion
Fads presented as harmless until the evidence reveals actual exploitation
A chapter that looks like light relief after tulips and crusades, and is slyly more. Mackay's subject is the same — contagion without cause — but shrunk to a scale where nobody is ruined, so he can study the mechanism in safety: a phrase appears from nowhere, saturates a city in hours, is chalked on every wall, answers every question, and dies of boredom. He is unusually good on the formal properties of a fad: universal applicability, the pleasure of mere sound, the fatal moment when a speculator mistakes it for a durable thing and builds a newspaper on it. He half-notices that slang and song alternate rather than succeed each other, which is the closest the book comes to a theory of collective attention, and he drops it immediately.
What he will not do is let the follies be anything but harmless. The evidence keeps resisting him. The 'shocking bad hat' costs poor men money they don't have; the Southwark origin shows the mob remembering a bribe more accurately than the respectable; the cabman is fined for failing to recognize a lord; the drunkard's 'flare up' is the only citizenship he has left. And Jim Crow — blackened faces, orphan children singing for bread — is condemned only as a noise, while his ventriloquized 'philosopher' is allowed to say the unforgivable thing about English abolition that Mackay won't say in his own voice.
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That device is the chapter's tell: irony delegated to a hypothetical foreigner costs the author nothing. The final 'let them be merry' is warm and slightly chilling — a man who opened by declaring that tears blind the physician, closing with a prescription of merriment for a disease he has agreed in advance not to examine.
Read Popular Follies of Great Cities with these cards beside each passage.
Open in FeedLitraPopular Admiration of Great Thieves
Why is Jonathan Wild the exception that reveals the rule?
How Popular Admiration of Great Thieves unfoldsAI-assisted
The opening: a universal habit, not a local quirk. Mackay begins by widening the frame before he narrows it. His first move is to establish that admiration for the bold thief is not an English peculiarity but something crowds everywhere do. He borrows the outsider's eye of the Abbé le Blanc, who found Englishmen boasting of their highwaymen with the same pride they reserved for their soldiers, and then runs the roll call outward — Germany's Schinderhannes, Hungary's Schubry, the brigand galleries of Italy and Spain, alongside the home-grown names of Robin Hood, Turpin, Sheppard, Duval and Cartouche. Having fixed the phenomenon as general, he offers its causes: the poor's resentment of the rich, which lets a robber be read as an avenger, and a simpler appetite for daring adventure. Both causes attach to nerve and style rather than to conduct, which is the hinge of everything that follows.
The development: the crowd's accounting, tested on cases. From that premise Mackay derives a consequence and then verifies it against examples. If the appeal rests on courage and showmanship, then the crowd will grade thieves by bravado and withhold its favour from the informer and the coward — and so it does. Jack Sheppard earned fame for nothing but breaking out of Newgate in irons and died at twenty-three pitied, printed and painted; Jonathan Wild, who betrayed his comrades and feared the rope, was pelted with dirt on the road to Tyburn; Turpin's body was snatched back from the surgeons and buried in triumph. Mackay then shows the same crooked bookkeeping applied to a popular thief's moral ledger: Robin Hood's almsgiving and courtesy to women, unremarkable in an honest man, made him the first thief of the world and Sherwood a shrine, while Turpin's admirers polished his robberies into anecdotes and passed quietly over his roasting of an old woman to make her give up her money. Small decencies are overpraised; cruelties are waived.
The turn: from the crowd's taste to those who feed it. The chapter then pivots from appetite to supply, and the charge sharpens into something stronger than disapproval — storytellers, and the stage above all, do more harm than the abuses of religion, because they make robbery attractive and thereby multiply the real thing. The mechanism is commercial: the theatre must please to profit, so it dresses the robber in fine costume, scenery and music, and sells a flattering falsehood about his life. The evidence is partly foreign and partly domestic. In Naples stage banditti proved so captivating that the authorities banned the dramas and even barred bandit costume at masquerades. For England, Mackay leans on Sir John Fielding of Bow Street, whose office records showed thieves increasing during the vogue of the Beggar's Opera — and here he makes his preference explicit, taking Fielding's books over Johnson's doubt that the opera had any such effect. It is worth noticing that he weighs authorities rather than refutes one, and he does not pretend otherwise.
The narrowing: where the harm actually bites. The general indictment of the theatre is then focused onto a specific place. The corrupting ingredient, on Mackay's account, is stagecraft itself, and it works hardest in the penny theatres crowded into London's poor and populous districts, where plays about thieves and murderers draw the largest houses of idle young men — precisely the spectators likeliest to imitate what they applaud. The support here is a matter of who fills the benches and what gets cheered, not of counted convictions, which is why the claim reads as an impression of a milieu rather than a measurement of it.
The close: a graded verdict and a doubted hope. Mackay ends by ranking the media instead of condemning them together, and the ranking is the chapter's real conclusion. Imitative German youths, he observes, are cooled by the squalor of actual prison and actual robbery, which bears no resemblance to the picturesque bandit of the stage; Byron's admirers of Conrad the Corsair write pirate verse but will not put to sea; rogue fiction like Gil Blas and Guzmán de Alfarache delights without recruiting anybody. Reading leaves the robber on the page, stripped of the sensory dressing that makes him a model worth copying, so admiration there stops at admiration. Hence poets may sing of thieves safely, and might even nudge the world toward a fairer sharing of goods — but the chapter does not end on that hope so much as on its improbability. The charmers, Mackay expects, will charm in vain.
Key claims, with the lines that support them
Admiration for bold thieves is not a local quirk but a habit of crowds everywhere.
Mackay opens this chapter with the sweep of the evidence: the Abbé le Blanc, visiting England, found Englishmen bragging about their highwaymen as proudly as about their soldiers and treating famous robbers as heroes; and each country supplies its own—Germany's Schinderhannes, Hungary's Schubry, and whole galleries of brigands in Italy and Spain.
“Whether it be that the multitude, feeling the pangs of poverty, sympathise with the daring and ingenious depredators who take away the rich man’s superfluity, or whether it be the interest that mankind in general feel for the records of perilous adventure, it is certain that the populace of all countries look with admiration upon great and successful thieves.”
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What earns the crowd's favour is courage, courtesy and flashy generosity—not innocence—and it is refused to thieves who inform or flinch at death.
Following from the sources of that admiration, the author tests it on cases: Jack Sheppard became famous for nothing but escaping Newgate in irons, and died at twenty-three pitied, printed and painted; whereas Jonathan Wild, who betrayed his comrades and feared the gallows, was pelted with dirt and stones on his way to Tyburn, while Turpin's corpse was rescued from the surgeons and buried in triumph.
“He was a pitiful fellow, who informed against his comrades, and was afraid of death. This meanness was not to be forgiven by the crowd;”
Popular Admiration of Great ThievesRead in context →
Once a thief is popular, the moral books are kept crookedly: his small decencies are overpraised and his cruelties waved away.
Mackay pairs two examples. Robin Hood's almsgiving and his respect for women made him the world's foremost thief and turned Sherwood into a place of pilgrimage, though the same acts in an honest man would have drawn no notice at all. Conversely Turpin's admirers retold his robberies as courteous anecdotes and were proud that England had bred him, while his roasting of an old woman over a fire to make her reveal her money was quietly excused.
“The few virtues he had, which would have ensured him no praise if he had been an honest man, have been blazoned forth by popular renown during seven successive centuries, and will never be forgotten while the English tongue endures.”
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3 more claims
Storytellers, and the stage above all, do more harm than abuses of religion, because they make robbery attractive and thereby actually multiply crime.
Here the chapter turns from the crowd's taste to those who feed it. In Naples, stage banditti proved so captivating that the authorities banned such dramas and even forbade bandit costume at masquerades. For England, Mackay leans on Sir John Fielding, chief magistrate at Bow Street, whose office records showed thieves greatly increasing during the vogue of the Beggar's Opera—evidence he prefers to Johnson's doubt that the opera had any such effect.
“In fact, the theatre, which can only expect to prosper, in a pecuniary sense, by pandering to the tastes of the people, continually recurs to the annals of thieves and banditti for its most favourite heroes.”
Popular Admiration of Great ThievesRead in context →
The corrupting ingredient is stagecraft itself—the scenery, the costumes and the music that sell false notions of a criminal's life.
From the general charge against the theatre the author narrows to where it bites. In the penny theatres crowded into London's poor and populous districts, plays about thieves and murderers pull the largest audiences of idle young men—precisely the spectators most likely to imitate what they applaud. Mackay rests this on who attends and what is cheered rather than on counted convictions.
“With the aid of scenery, fine dresses and music, and the very false notions they convey, they vitiate the public taste, not knowing,”
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Poets, by contrast, may sing of thieves without danger, and might even nudge the world toward a fairer sharing of goods—though Mackay expects they will not.
He points to rogue fiction as proof that the subject can delight harmlessly: Gil Blas and Guzmán de Alfarache entertain without recruiting robbers, and Byron's admirers of Conrad the Corsair write pirate verse but will not actually put to sea. The chapter nonetheless closes on probability against reform, with the charmers charming in vain.
“The probability, however, seems to be, that the charmers will charm in vain, charm they ever so wisely.”
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How it works
The 3 mechanisms the chapter’s argument runs on.
Mechanism 1
Why crowds crown robbers
Mackay traces the admiration to two feelings: the poor's resentment of the rich, which makes a robber look like an avenger, and a plain hunger for daring adventure. Because the appeal rests on nerve and style rather than conduct, the crowd ends up grading thieves by courage and showmanship instead of innocence.
Mechanism 2
From stage glamour to real theft
The theatre must please to profit, so it dresses robbers in fine costume, scenery and music and sells a flattering falsehood about their lives. Idle young spectators copy the admired model, and so the glamour converts into actual robbery—which is why Mackay calls the playwright more corrupting than the balladeer.
Mechanism 3
Why print rarely moves to action
Reading leaves the robber on the page without the sensory dressing that makes him a model to copy, so admiration stops at admiration. And where imitation does begin, reality itself cures it: the squalor of actual robbery bears no resemblance to the picturesque bandit.
Common misreadings
If tales of robbers breed robbers, then novels and poems about thieves must be as dangerous as plays about them, and should be treated alike.
Mackay deliberately grades the media. He holds mere reading and verse safe—rogue novels like Gil Blas entertain without harm, and Byron's imitators produce pirate poetry rather than piracy—while the stage, with its scenery, dress and music, is what turns admiration into imitation, most of all in the penny theatres packed with idle youths.
“The probability, however, seems to be, that the charmers will charm in vain, charm they ever so wisely.”
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The chapter settles the question: it has been shown that crime drama causes crime.
The author argues for the link but concedes it is contested, noting that Johnson doubted the Beggar's Opera increased theft and siding with Fielding's Bow Street records rather than refuting him; and the penny-theatre indictment rests on who fills the benches and what they cheer, not on measured rates of offending. The case is a weighing of authorities and impressions, not a demonstration.
“In fact, the theatre, which can only expect to prosper, in a pecuniary sense, by pandering to the tastes of the people, continually recurs to the annals of thieves and banditti for its most favourite heroes.”
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Key concepts in Popular Admiration of Great Thieves
- Thief-hero admiration
- The crowd's habit of treating daring robbers as heroes worth celebrating.
- Where it applies: Withheld from thieves seen as mean or cowardly, such as Jonathan Wild.
- Dying game
- Facing execution with cheerful bravado, which the crowd rewards with sympathy and fame.
- Where it applies: It is style at the gallows, not any real virtue in the criminal's life.
- Theatrical glamour of crime
- Plays and ballads dress robbers in picturesque costume and reckless charm, making crime attractive.
- Where it applies: Mackay concedes the causal link is disputed, citing Johnson's doubts against Fielding's records.
- Popular imitativeness
- People copy admired models, here copying stage robbers into real robbery. The crowd's habit of copying admired figures, including criminals it has been taught to admire.
- Where it applies: Applies most to the young and already vicious. In this chapter it bites hardest on idle young spectators of staged crime, far less on adult readers of rogue fiction.
- Penny theatre school of crime
- Cheap London theatres in poor districts whose thief-and-murderer plays effectively teach crime to young audiences.
- Where it applies: Mackay's claim rests on who attends and what is applauded, not on measured conviction rates.
- Harmless admiration in print
- Enjoying rogues in books or ballads, which Mackay thinks carries no risk of imitation.
- Where it applies: Applies to fiction and verse read privately; the footnoted Jack Sheppard case shows books plus drama can breach this line.
0 more concepts
Reader’s notes on Popular Admiration of Great ThievesAI reading companion
“The few virtues he had, which would have ensured him no praise if he had been an honest man”
Read in context →The sharpest line so far: virtue priced by contrast. Honesty makes charity invisible; crime makes it dazzling. Mackay has found the actual arithmetic of the halo.
“his cruelty in placing an old woman upon a fire, to force her to tell him where she had hidden her money, is regarded as a good joke”
Read in context →He drops the torture in mid-sentence, flanked by the famous ride and the proud scaffold. The syntax itself performs how the public files atrocity between two pieces of glamour.
“Turpin lost his bet and paid it immediately”
Read in context →Note what the admiring narrator counts as honour — a settled wager between a robber and the man he robbed. Gentlemanliness has become a closed circuit that quietly excludes the law.
15 more notes
“He was a pitiful fellow, who informed against his comrades, and was afraid of death.”
Read in context →Here the crowd's real creed shows: Wild's sin isn't his crimes but his cowardice. The mob judges style, not harm — and pelts the informer while garlanding the murderer.
“Burst asunder the fetters of your beloved lusts, mount the chimney of hope”
Read in context →The street-preacher can't resist the escape story either — he smuggles the whole crowd-pleasing itinerary into a sermon. Piety borrowing a thief's box-office.
“which was very delightful to the eye”
Read in context →The Duke catalogues velvet sleeves and silk stockings for a paragraph and ends on aesthetics — and then recruits 3,500 of them. Costume was always the recruiting poster.
“they found that real, everyday robbers were very unlike the conventional banditti of the stage”
Read in context →Damp straw and bread and water: the only critic that ever refuted Schiller. Mackay's funniest and most honest point — reality, not moralising, cures romance.
“thieves may become reconciled to the age, and the age to them”
Read in context →The ending slides from moralist to near-radical: if plunder is just the old rule of take-who-can, the rich are in the same trade. Then he retreats into "charm in vain" — a shrug that hides the sharper thought.
“the English call these fellows the ‘Gentlemen of the Road,’”
Read in context →The nickname does the ideological work by itself — gentility conferred on extortion. And the Abbé's deadpan "highway surveyors" quietly indicts a state that collected no tax and kept no roads.
“he may run the chance of getting himself knocked on the head for his poverty”
Read in context →Here the romance collapses. The celebrated code of honour turns out to have a clause: being poor is the one unforgivable offence.
“fixed up papers at the doors of rich people about London, expressly forbidding all persons”
Read in context →Robbers issuing proclamations in the grammar of government — "on pain of death" is a sovereign's phrase. They aren't evading the state, they're parodying it.
“if it were only to shew the vast improvement which has taken place since that period”
Read in context →A touch smug. The author leans on a foreign witness for distance, then spends the rest of the note proving his own age breeds thieves by other means — the improvement is in method, not in appetite.
“I thought this Jack Sheppard was a clever fellow for making his escape and robbing his master.”
Read in context →A 14-year-old delivers the chapter's thesis more economically than the author can. But note what the boy adds next — "he got done at last" — he absorbed the moral and stole anyway. Which rather undoes the argument that better endings would fix him.
“I took the money from my mother out of her pocket as she was sitting down, and I beside her.”
Read in context →The one detail no report-writer would invent: the closeness of the two bodies. Whatever the theatre taught him, this sentence is the real crime in the passage.
“think the Artful Dodger is very like some of the boys here”
Read in context →Dickens wrote the Dodger as indictment, and here a child receives him as a mirror. The boy is a better critic than the Inspector: he's noticed that the reformers' fiction and the criminals' fiction are the same book.
“said it was rare fun to see him break out of prison”
Read in context →This one never saw the play. The legend travels by hearsay, which means suppressing the performance would change nothing — the author's culprits, the "thoughtless novelists," are the one link the testimony shows to be dispensable.
“but Blueskin made the most fun”
Read in context →An eleven-year-old quietly reviewing the cast. No theory of corruption survives contact with a child who simply preferred the sidekick.
“sufficient has been already quoted to shew the injurious effects of the deification of great thieves by thoughtless novelists”
Read in context →"Sufficient" is doing a lot of lifting. Four boys already in gaol, selected by a prison inspector hunting this exact cause — the sampling is the conclusion. The chapter's real insight was that admiration is ancient and popular; blaming novelists shrinks it to a publishing problem.
A reader’s takeAI reading companion
The crowd judges style, not harm: murderers garlanded, informers pelted
Mackay's chapter on great thieves opens as a catalogue and closes as a prosecution — and the gap between those two modes is where the real interest lies. He begins with the sound observation that admiration for the bold robber is ancient, international and popular: Robin Hood sung in English ballads, Turpin riding to York, Sheppard climbing out of Newgate, Duval and Cartouche and Schinderhannes, the German bandit chief who could recruit three thousand men partly on the strength of velvet sleeves and silk stockings. The sharpest thing in the first half is Mackay's accidental discovery of how the halo is actually built. Virtue, he notes, earns no praise in an honest man; it dazzles only by contrast with crime. That is the whole arithmetic of the legend, and once stated it explains everything else — why a settled wager between robber and victim counts as honour while the law is quietly excluded from the circuit, why torture of an old woman over a fire can be filed mid-sentence between two pieces of glamour and received as a good joke, why Jonathan Wild's unforgivable sin was not murder but informing and fearing death. The crowd judges style, not harm. It garlands the murderer and pelts the coward.
The chapter is also, almost against its will, a study of how power borrows its own costume. Robbers post proclamations on rich men's doors in the grammar of sovereignty, 'on pain of death'; the English name them Gentlemen of the Road and the French Abbé deadpans that they are highway surveyors — an indictment of a state that collected no tax and kept no roads. A street preacher cannot resist the escape story either, and smuggles the chimney of hope into a sermon: piety borrowing a thief's box office. And the celebrated code of honour turns out to carry a clause — be poor, and you may get knocked on the head for it. That is where the romance collapses from the inside, with no help from the moralist.
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Mackay's honest moment comes with the German youths who ran off to be Schiller's banditti and found damp straw, bread and water. Reality, not preaching, cured them. That is funnier and truer than anything in his argument, and it should have warned him off the argument he then makes. For in the second half he ranks the culprits and lands on the playwright, above all the penny theatres of London, as the engine that manufactures criminals. The evidence is four boys already in gaol, questioned by a prison inspector hunting that exact cause — the sampling is the conclusion. And the testimony quietly dismantles it. One boy delivers the thesis better than the author, then adds that Sheppard 'got done at last': he absorbed the moral and stole anyway. One never saw the play at all and had the legend by hearsay, which means suppressing the performance changes nothing. One thinks the Artful Dodger is like the boys around him, receiving as a mirror what Dickens wrote as indictment. And one simply preferred Blueskin, because the sidekick was more fun — no theory of corruption survives that. The one line with real weight is a boy taking money from his mother's pocket while sitting beside her; whatever the theatre taught him, that closeness is the actual crime, and no stage wrote it.
So the chapter's structure is its own critique. Its insight is large — admiration for the thief is old, popular and rooted in how we price virtue and style — and its remedy is small: blame the thoughtless novelists, and the whole thing shrinks to a publishing problem. 'Sufficient has been already quoted' does a great deal of lifting. Mackay even glimpses the bigger claim he is backing away from: that if plunder is only the old rule of take-who-can, the rich are in the same trade, and thieves may become reconciled to the age and the age to them. Then he shrugs that one may charm in vain, and retreats. Read him for the diagnosis and distrust the cure. The improvement he congratulates his age upon is in method, not appetite — and the halo he wants to blame on writers is one the crowd has always been perfectly capable of weaving for itself.
Read Popular Admiration of Great Thieves with these cards beside each passage.
Open in FeedLitraDuels and Ordeals
How did later law finally displace trial by battle?
How Duels and Ordeals unfoldsAI-assisted
The chapter opens genealogically rather than argumentatively. Mackay takes the duel back to the war habits of the barbarian tribes, where settling a dispute by force was simply continuous with ordinary life, and then introduces the first institution that tried to displace it: the Church. Crucially, he frames the clergy's opposition from the start as a question of who holds the power of judgment, not as humanity recoiling from bloodshed. The evidence he assembles is the sweep of the censures — Valentia and Trent excommunicating seconds and even spectators, princes threatened with the loss of their dominions — set beside the substitute the Church offered: five ordeals whose apparatus (the ploughshares, the wool-wrapped sticks, the consecrated bread) was prepared by priests alone. Since the men who heated the irons could fix the result, the ordeal measured clerical intention rather than guilt; Queen Emma walked the irons unhurt when her order's credit depended on her innocence, and the bread-ordeal reserved for priests is recorded as choking nobody. This opening move also sets up the chapter's one tacit judgment on both parties: duel and ordeal rest on the same superstition, that God will perform a miracle to order.
Development: chivalry, the collapse of pretexts, and law licensing combat
The chapter then moves forward in time to chivalry, which pulled judgment back out of priestly hands by reviving judicial combat — because honour was the currency the warrior class actually valued, and a man cleared in the lists before applauding peers gained far more than one given a cold formal acquittal by a church court. From there Mackay enters his main historical sequence, fifteenth- to seventeenth-century France, and the development proceeds by two mutually reinforcing demonstrations. First, that the stated cause of a duel explains nothing: Troussel, denied leave to fight, converted Du Guesclin's refusal of a ransom bond into an affront and forced combat on a man shaking with ague — a pattern Mackay later runs down the centuries through Byron and Chaworth over game, Sterne's father over a goose, Raleigh over a tavern bill, Macnamara over fighting dogs. Second, that official justice itself licensed the practice by ordering a fight wherever proof was wanting: the parliament of Paris rejected the wife's sworn denial and ordered the Carrouges–Legris combat, the king making her stand on a scaffold as a presumed criminal until victory cleared her; in the same spirit a council commanded Fendille, a poor swordsman, to face the expert D'Aguerre or forfeit his honours. Royal prohibition is then introduced only to be shown collapsing from within — Henry II swore after the 1547 Jarnac duel never to permit another, broke the oath within two years in the Fendille affair, and died in a tournament; Henry IV's Fontainebleau edict and court of chivalry threatened death and confiscation while the same king told Créqui he would gladly act as his second were he not king.
The turn: Richelieu's gallows and the discovery that the penalty is aimed wrong
The pivot of the chapter is Richelieu, and it is a turn in argument rather than merely in chronology. Richelieu, whose own brother died in a duel, carries severity as far as it will go — hanging the corpses of duellists on gallows — and the measure sobers France only briefly. This failure is where Mackay's explanation crystallises: the duellist fights to protect his reputation and makes a point of despising death, so executing him supplies precisely the glory he is seeking. Everything after this point is read through that discovery. The absurdities that follow — seconds multiplying until men manufactured quarrels for the privilege of serving, Germany legalising duelling grounds, Malta confining duels to a single street — illustrate how far a custom can run when the sanction that actually governs it lies outside the law. Against that, Louis XIV's 1679 edict registers as the chapter's one qualified success, not because it was harsher but because it combined unpardoning enforcement with a lawful court of honour that offered satisfaction, backed by a personal pledge from the nobility.
Further development: England, juries, and folly carried into the modern age
Mackay then crosses to England and forward into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where the demonstration is repeated with the licensing agent changed. Where French kings pardoned, English juries did the equivalent work: a reform bill after Hamilton and Mohun killed each other in Hyde Park in November 1712 was thrown out on second reading; Colonel Hamilton and General Macartney were convicted of manslaughter only, to loud applause; Count Rice, who shot Du Barri dead over a gambling dispute, got a nominal punishment; and Charles II had earlier pardoned Buckingham and all concerned in the Barn Elms duel that killed Jenkins. Around this run Bacon's Star Chamber charge, Lord Sanquir's hired murder, the Queen Anne satirists, the Irish fire-eaters and the German students, and the catalogue of trivial causes — dogs, geese, tavern bills — which lets Mackay make his sharpest concession: this was folly that even great minds could not refuse.
Close: why severity cannot work, and the remedy proposed
The chapter closes by surveying the anti-duelling laws of Prussia, Austria, the American states, Poland, Munich and Naples and pronouncing them futile, and here Mackay states plainly that the failure is not softness. The harshest experiments were tried — Frederick had whole battalions shoot the survivor, Joseph II ordered court-martial and declared he would stamp out duelling though it cost him half his officers — and the custom held, because the binding sanction was never the statute. He locates it in public opinion, and specifically in the admiration of women: Graves, after killing Cilley in 1838, told the House that it was the paramount law of the nation and of that House which drove him to the field, and Colonel Thomas added a clause to his will begging pardon for a step he abhorred but could not refuse for fear of opinion. The conclusion follows from the diagnosis rather than from indignation: since death flatters the duellist and disgrace injures him, the remedy is to strike at standing — pillory, whipping, transportation — and, following Addison, to establish a court of honour with shame-based penalties, so that the man who declines the field has somewhere honourable to go.
Key claims, with the lines that support them
The Church fought the duel mainly to keep final judgment in its own hands, not out of horror at bloodshed.
Mackay points to how far the censures went: the councils of Valentia and Trent excommunicated not just the fighters but their seconds and even the spectators, and threatened princes who tolerated duels with the loss of their dominions. The alternative the Church offered was its own set of ordeals, in which the deciding power rested wholly with the clergy — so what the campaign removed from the nobles it handed to the priesthood.
“By the former, the power of deciding the guilt or innocence was vested wholly in their hands; while by the latter they enjoyed no power or privilege at all.”
Duels and OrdealsRead in context →
By the late middle ages the stated cause of a duel explained nothing, since a man resolved to fight would manufacture an insult out of anything.
Troussel, refused leave to fight, treated Du Guesclin's refusal of a ransom bond as an affront and forced a combat on a man shaking with ague. Mackay then shows the same pattern running down the centuries: Byron and Chaworth fought over who kept more game, Sterne's father over a goose, Raleigh over a tavern bill, and Macnamara shot Montgomery dead after their dogs fought.
“Upon pretexts just as strange, and often more frivolous that these, duels continued to be fought in most of the countries of Europe during the whole of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.”
Duels and OrdealsRead in context →
Official justice itself licensed the practice by ordering combat wherever evidence was lacking, so victory took the place of proof.
Following from the collapse of real pretexts, the courts still treated a fight as a verdict: the parliament of Paris refused the wife's sworn denial as evidence and ordered the Carrouges-Legris duel, with the king making her stand on a scaffold as a presumed criminal until the fight cleared her. In the same spirit a council commanded Fendille, a poor swordsman, to meet the expert D'Aguerre or forfeit all his honours.
“The lady’s asseverations of innocence were held to be no evidence by the parliament, and the duel was commanded, with all the ceremonies.”
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3 more claims
Royal bans failed because the kings' own feelings and pardons cut against their own laws.
Two years after Henry II swore he would never again permit a duel, his council authorised and encouraged the Fendille–D'Aguerre fight. Henry IV's Fontainebleau edict made the marshals of France judges of a court of chivalry and threatened death and confiscation, yet the number of duels did not fall — the same king told Créqui that were he not king he would gladly serve as his second, and never brought himself to punish a duellist.
“It is not anywhere stated that Henry interfered to prevent it, notwithstanding his solemn oath; but that, on the contrary, he encouraged it, and appointed the Marshal de la Marque to see that it was conducted according to the rules of chivalry.”
Duels and OrdealsRead in context →
Where kings pardoned, English juries did the same work: law and verdicts in practice licensed duelling.
A reform bill after the Hamilton–Mohun affair — in which both men died in Hyde Park in November 1712 — was thrown out on the second reading. Colonel Hamilton and General Macartney were convicted of manslaughter only, to loud public applause, and Count Rice, who shot Du Barri dead over a gambling dispute, escaped with a merely nominal punishment. Earlier, Charles II had pardoned Buckingham and everyone concerned in the Barn Elms duel that killed Jenkins.
“A bill to that effect was brought forward, but thrown out on the second reading, to the very great regret of all the sensible portion of the community.”
Duels and OrdealsRead in context →
Severity can never cure the custom while the men who make and apply the law privately accept the code of honour.
Mackay grants that the harshest measures were tried — Frederick had whole battalions shoot the survivor, and Joseph II ordered court-martial and said he would stamp out duelling though it cost him half his officers — yet the practice held, because the real sanction lies elsewhere: after killing Cilley in 1838, Graves told the House that it was the paramount law of the nation and of that House which forced him to the field. Colonel Thomas, killed in a duel, even added a clause to his will begging pardon for a step he abhorred but could not refuse for fear of opinion.
“But the frowns of the law never yet have taught, and never will teach, men to desist from this practice, as long as it is felt that the lawgiver sympathises with it in his heart.”
Duels and OrdealsRead in context →
How it works
The 3 mechanisms the chapter’s argument runs on.
Mechanism 1
Priests staged the ordeal, so they fixed the verdict
Only the clergy prepared the ploughshares, the wool-wrapped sticks and the consecrated bread, so whoever handled the apparatus could settle the outcome in advance. The ordeal therefore measured the priests' intention rather than the accused's guilt: Queen Emma crossed the irons unhurt when her order's credit was tied to her innocence, and the bread-ordeal reserved for priests is recorded as choking no one.
Mechanism 2
Combat paid better in reputation than a church verdict
A nobleman cleared by the Church got only a cold formal acquittal, while a man who won in the lists was cleared in front of applauding peers. Because honour was the currency the warrior class actually valued, the fight outbid the ordeal, which is why the aristocracy pulled judgment back out of clerical hands.
Mechanism 3
Death flatters the duellist; disgrace injures him
The duellist fights to protect reputation and makes a point of despising death, so hanging or shooting him supplies exactly the glory he seeks — as Richelieu found when gallows and exposed corpses sobered France only briefly. A penalty aimed at standing instead (pillory, whipping, transportation) strikes the one thing he is unwilling to lose, which is why Mackay follows Addison in preferring shame to execution.
Common misreadings
Since the clergy excommunicated duellists, the Church was the humane and rational party in this story.
On Mackay's reading the churchmen's objection was jurisdictional: the ordeals they substituted left guilt to be decided by the very priests who heated the irons or wrapped the sticks, and both sides rested on the same error — that God will work a miracle on demand to clear the innocent. Condemning the duel therefore left the underlying superstition untouched.
“By the former, the power of deciding the guilt or innocence was vested wholly in their hands; while by the latter they enjoyed no power or privilege at all.”
Duels and OrdealsRead in context →
The lesson is that the rulers were simply too soft, and a consistently applied death penalty would have ended duelling.
Mackay's point is that the penalty was aimed at the wrong fear: these men gloried in despising death, so Richelieu's gallows and exposed corpses, and Frederick's firing squads, produced only temporary effect. What did bite was Louis XIV's combination of unpardoning enforcement with a lawful court of honour offering satisfaction and a personal pledge from the nobility, and what Mackay recommends is disgrace rather than the scaffold.
“He had with all his acuteness, miscalculated the spirit of duelling.”
Duels and OrdealsRead in context →
Key concepts in Duels and Ordeals
- Judicial combat
- Settling legal disputes by sword, treating victory as proof of innocence. Courts ordered a fight when no legal evidence existed, treating the winner's victory as God's verdict on guilt.
- Where it applies: Applied where no positive proof existed; exempted women, the sick, the young and old. Applies to charges unprovable by testimony, such as slander or rape where the accuser's word was refused.
- Judicium Dei
- Church-run ordeals by cross, fire, water or bread, read as God's verdict.
- Where it applies: Outcome was controlled by the clergy who staged it, so it tested their intent more than guilt.
- Divine interference as proof
- The belief that the Almighty will work a miracle on request to clear the innocent.
- Where it applies: Shared by both sides, which is why condemning the duel left the underlying error intact.
- Chivalric honour
- Aristocratic code making war the business of life and insult answerable only in the lists.
- Where it applies: Outlived its institutions: tournaments died, the duel survived.
- Frivolous pretext for combat
- A man determined to fight would manufacture an insult out of any refusal, so the stated cause had nothing to do with the real motive.
- Where it applies: Describes the duellist's own fabrication, not quarrels arising from genuine injury.
- Unenforced edict against duelling
- Rulers issued solemn bans and oaths but kept granting permissions and pardons, so the law was read as a formality.
- Where it applies: Concerns royal sympathy and pardon, not the parliament's own decrees, which lacked power to enforce.
10 more concepts
- Duel madness
- A period when fighting became a social requirement, so men sought quarrels to avoid the shame of never having fought.
- Where it applies: Strongest in France; duels occurred elsewhere in Europe but far less often.
- False notion of honour
- A borrowed social idea that one's standing depends on answering any slight with the sword, which makes legal penalties feel cheaper than refusal.
- Where it applies: Describes the motive of duellists in France and England here; it does not explain judicial combat, which was a legal procedure for settling claims.
- Court of honour
- Louis XIV's tribunal of the marshals of France, meant to give satisfaction for insults so that no one needed a sword to get it. A tribunal judging insults and compelling public apology instead of combat.
- Where it applies: A substitute channel for grievance, not a shame penalty; refusal was met with fine, prison, or confiscation. Works only against men who still fear shame.
- Licensed duelling ground
- Designated places where duelling was lawful, so the law neither forbade nor truly restrained the killing, only located it.
- Where it applies: Applies to the German towns Sully names and to Malta's single street; elsewhere duelling was criminal.
- Second as mark of friendship
- Serving as another man's second was so flattering that gentlemen inflated trifles into quarrels just to be asked.
- Where it applies: Specific to the French fashion Mackay describes, where the number of seconds was unfixed and seconds fought each other.
- Bonds of folly
- Customs held by mere opinion are harder to break than chains of reason.
- Where it applies: Describes motive of men who privately condemn the practice, not of genuine fanatics.
- False spirit of honour
- The code that made an affront demand blood, costing men their lives and souls. A code that treats refusing a challenge as disgrace, overriding law and conscience.
- Where it applies: Applies to duelling custom; not to all notions of honour. Describes social expectation, not individual malice.
- Fire-eaters
- Party bullies in Ireland who trained at targets to maim opponents to order.
- Where it applies: Specific to pre-Union Irish political life.
- Nominal punishment
- Juries reduced duelling murder to manslaughter, so verdicts encouraged the practice.
- Where it applies: English juries; France and George III's Irish example went the other way.
- Public opinion as paramount law
- Opinion outranks written and divine law in practice.
- Where it applies: Quoted from Graves's speech, not a legal doctrine.
Reader’s notes on Duels and OrdealsAI reading companion
“Two dogs who tear each other for a bone, or two bantams fighting on a dunghill”
Read in context →The rhetorical flattening is the whole argument: put Wimbledon gentlemen in the same sentence as dunghill cockerels and honour dies of embarrassment. Cheap, and effective.
“God was supposed to nerve the arm of the combatant whose cause was just”
Read in context →Note the passive "was supposed" — the author stays safely outside a belief he'll soon call blasphemous.
“those who enwrapped them could, without any difficulty, distinguish the one from the other”
Read in context →He pauses to grant the priests good faith, then quietly hands them the trick. Generosity that convicts more thoroughly than accusation would.
17 more notes
“if they sank, and were drowned, their surviving friends had the consolation of knowing that they were innocent”
Read in context →The driest line in the chapter. Class is the real verdict: the rich got rigged ploughshares, the poor got a pond.
“There is no instance upon record of a priest having been choked in this manner.”
Read in context →One sentence, no commentary needed. The clergy wrote themselves an ordeal with a guaranteed acquittal.
“both were alike agreeable to God, and that they should be used by turns”
Read in context →A miracle that fails to pick a side gets read as diplomacy. The ordeal was never evidence — it was ratification of a settlement already needed.
“It has put variance between men’s reason and their honour”
Read in context →Here he stops sneering and lands something true: the duel survives not because men believe in it but because they fear the look of refusing.
“The difficulty of this question was found so insurmountable, that none of the lawyers of that day could resolve it.”
Read in context →An inheritance doctrine settled by which horseman stayed mounted — and it became law. Absurd, yet a decision had to come from somewhere.
“the whole realm believed him a traitor and a coward because he had been vanquished”
Read in context →The cruelest case: he survived the battle and lost the only thing it was about. Proof by outcome leaves no room for being merely unlucky.
“left the field to the meaner combatants, who were afterwards to make sport for the people”
Read in context →The honour machine has a lower deck: squires jousting with blunted lances as the afterpiece. Nobody's reputation rides on it — so nobody dies. The pointlessness of the lances gives away the whole game.
“the king made her descend, judging her unworthy, because she was criminal in his eyes till her innocence was proved”
Read in context →The woman stands on a scaffold while two men settle whether she was raped. Her own testimony is "no evidence"; her husband's sword arm is. Presumption of guilt dressed as deference to God.
“his father had married a young and beautiful woman, who, loving the son far better than the sire, supplied him with as much money as he desired”
Read in context →Note what actually kills: not the deed but the telling. Chataigneraie's crime is breaking a confidence, and the chain king-to-courtiers-to-everyone is drawn with real relish.
“A case like this could not be met or rebutted by any legal proof, and the royal council ordered that it should be decided by single combat”
Read in context →Here's the honest admission underneath the whole institution: the duel is what you do when evidence runs out. A procedure for the unprovable — which is why it never settles anything except who is stronger.
“aimed two blows at the left thigh of La Chataigneraie, who had left it uncovered”
Read in context →Divine judgment loses to a biomechanical trade-off. He bared the thigh for speed, and the weaker man crouched and took it — and France named a word after it. God's verdict, reclassified as a dirty trick.
“O Domine, non sum dignus!”
Read in context →Instant piety from the man who just exploited a gap in armour. Whether that's gratitude or alibi, the Latin converts a technique into a sign from heaven.
“it seems most probable that it was never issued”
Read in context →The author plays archivist for a moment — no registry, so no edict — then convicts Henry of perjury two paragraphs later on exactly the oath whose written form he just doubted.
“One is tempted to look upon the death of Henry II. as a judgment upon him for his perjury”
Read in context →"One is tempted" — the hedge that lets him have it both ways. A whole chapter dismantling trial-by-combat as superstition, then a lance in the eye read as heaven's bookkeeping.
“being a wise and very courteous gentleman, he left it to the relatives of the deceased to be honourably buried”
Read in context →Courtesy measured as the mutilations declined. And the reward isn't justice — it's renown among the ladies of Paris. Brantôme states the real currency without noticing.
“Go, and if I were not a king, I would be your second”
Read in context →One sentence annihilating a reign of edicts. He legislates as sovereign and sympathises as gentleman, and everyone hears which voice is sincere.
“his chief desire was to free himself from the imputation of non-duelling, by picking a quarrel with somebody”
Read in context →The sharpest line yet: abstention itself becomes the accusation. Once not-fighting is a stain, the practice is self-fuelling and no penalty reaches it.
A reader’s takeAI reading companion
He needs no accusation, the design confesses itself
Read whole, "Duels and Ordeals" is less a history than a long demolition, and its method is visible from the first page: Mackay reduces the duel to its physical shape — two dogs over a bone, two bantams on a dunghill — because honour cannot survive being described plainly. That flattening is cheap and it works, and he uses it again and again, letting absurdity do the arguing while he keeps his own hands clean behind phrases like "God was supposed to" and "one is tempted to think."
The chapter's structure is a genealogy with a sting in its tail. It begins with the barbarian habit of settling everything by the sword, then introduces the clergy — not as opponents of bloodshed, but as competitors for jurisdiction. The five ordeals are the chapter's finest sequence, and the quietest. Mackay pauses to grant the priests good faith, then calmly notes that whoever wrapped the ploughshares could tell the hot from the cold; that the drowned were posthumously declared innocent; that no priest was ever choked by the corsned. He does not need to accuse anyone. The design confesses itself: the rich got rigged iron, the poor got a pond, and the clergy wrote one ordeal with a guaranteed acquittal. Most damning is the ruling that two contradictory ordeals were "alike agreeable to God" and should be used by turns — proof that the ordeal was never evidence at all, only the ratification of a settlement someone already needed.
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From there chivalry revives judicial combat and the chapter marches through France: an inheritance doctrine settled by which horseman stayed mounted, and so becoming law; a woman made to step down from the scaffold because she is criminal until a sword proves otherwise, her own testimony counting as nothing beside her husband's arm; a knight who survives his battle and loses the only thing it was about, since proof by outcome leaves no room for being merely unlucky. The Jarnac duel is the hinge. Its true cause is not a deed but the telling of one — a broken confidence passed from king to courtiers to everyone — and its outcome is a biomechanical trade-off: a bared thigh, a crouching weaker man, two blows, and a word added to the French language. The O Domine, non sum dignus! that follows converts a dirty trick into a sign from heaven, and Mackay lets the Latin indict itself. He is not above the same move: having doubted that Henry II's edict was ever issued, he convicts him of perjury on that oath two paragraphs later, and reads the lance in his eye as heaven's bookkeeping — superstition dismissed for four pages and reinstated for one good sentence.
Then the machinery of failure. Richelieu hangs corpses on gallows and changes nothing; Louis XIV legislates; Prussia, Austria, Poland, Naples, Munich and the American states all legislate; the English bring judicial combat, Bacon's Star Chamber charge, hired murder, and royal pardons that empty the statutes of meaning. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries supply the farce — seconds multiplying absurdly, men manufacturing quarrels for the privilege of serving, Irish fire-eaters, German students, blood spilled over dogs, geese and tavern bills, and great minds who knew better and went anyway.
Why none of it works is stated twice, and these are the chapter's two honest sentences. First: the duel is a procedure for the unprovable — what men do when evidence runs out, which is precisely why it settles nothing except who was stronger. Second: it "has put variance between men's reason and their honour." Men fight not because they believe the sword judges truly but because they dread the look of refusing. Once abstention is itself an accusation — once a man's chief business is clearing himself of the imputation of never having fought — the practice feeds on its own fuel and no gallows can reach it. Henry IV's "if I were not a king, I would be your second" annihilates a reign of edicts in a dozen words, because everyone can hear which of his two voices is sincere. And the chapter's own lower deck gives the game away entirely: squires with blunted lances making sport for the crowd after the gentlemen leave, nobody's reputation riding on it, so nobody dying.
What I would tell a reader: do not take the laughter as the argument. Mackay's remedy — a court of honour that punishes with shame rather than death — looks weak and is in fact the only proposal consistent with his diagnosis. If reputation is the engine, reputation is the brake; if fear of death were sufficient, Richelieu's gallows would have ended the matter. The chapter also deserves to be read against the grain. Mackay is a sharp prosecutor of other men's superstitions and a willing user of his own; he admires the chronicler Brantôme's gossip even as Brantôme names the real currency — renown among the ladies of Paris — without noticing what he has admitted; and his final turn to "female admiration" as a cause is the moment the diagnosis slides toward blame. But the central insight survives all of it, and it is not about swords. Wherever a community agrees that declining to perform costs more than performing, the performance becomes compulsory and immune to law. The costumes change. The dunghill does not.
Read Duels and Ordeals with these cards beside each passage.
Open in FeedLitraRelics
What test separates a genuine relic from a manufactured one?
How Relics unfoldsAI-assisted
Mackay's chapter on relics opens not with ridicule but with sympathy, and that concession is the structural key to everything that follows. After the Burns epigraph about a hoard of "auld knick-knackets," he grants that the love of relics "will never be eradicated as long as feeling and affection are denizens of the heart," and that it is "most easily excited in the best and kindliest natures." He builds a ladder of legitimate cases: first the home relics — a dead wife's lock of hair, a book annotated by a hand now cold — then relics "sanctified by that admiration of greatness and goodness which is akin to love," his examples being Shakespeare's signature in Florio's Montaigne, Rubens's chair at Antwerp, Galileo's telescope in Florence, Tell's arrow, the swords of Wallace and Hampden. Only then does the hinge arrive: from "this germ of purity how numerous the progeny of errors and superstitions!" The error he names precisely — men forget "that goodness is a component part of true greatness," and so confound "the famous and the infamous, the renowned and the notorious." Saints and sinners, philosophers and quacks, conquerors and murderers, ministers and thieves: each has collectors willing to ransack the earth. That distinction between veneration earned and veneration merely excited by notoriety governs this chapter.
The development then runs in two long movements. The first is religious and medieval, dated to "the centuries immediately preceding the Crusades," when returning pilgrims flooded Europe with apocryphal wares. The true cross leads — Helena's discovery, Theodosius's gift to St. Ambrose, the jewelled relic burnt by the Huns for its stones — yet fragments multiplied until they "would, if collected together in one place, have been almost sufficient to have built a cathedral." Mackay then descends a deliberately degrading scale: the Saviour's tears, the Virgin's and St. Peter's tears in caskets worn in the bosom, drops of blood, the Virgin's milk, and finally hair and toenails, where the satire lands hardest — a nail "cut from the filthy foot of some unscrupulous ecclesiastic" sold "at a diamond's price," St. Peter's toes "uncommonly prolific" enough to fill a sack by the Council of Clermont, some still shown at Aix-la-Chapelle to pilgrims travelling a hundred German miles. He adds the Port Royal thorn that cured Mademoiselle Perrier's eyes by a kiss, the Santa Scala at Rome which only the knees may touch, and a survey of surviving stock: Charlemagne's thigh-bone for lameness, the Virgin's thigh-bone at Halle (and seven or eight more in Spain), St. Gudule's teeth at Brussels for toothache, buried bones that ooze curative springs.
The turn comes with a shift of object rather than of tone: "It is curious to remark the avidity manifested in all ages... to obtain possession of some relic of any persons who have been much spoken of, even for their crimes." Here the chapter moves from the sacred to the secular and criminal, and from distant centuries toward the author's own. William Longbeard's hair and the mould beneath his gallows; Masaniello, shot like a mad dog and dragged through the mire, then buried in royal robes by torchlight while his hut's door was cut into caskets and the soil he trod sold by weight in gold. Madame de Brinvilliers sharpens the point, since Mackay concedes Masaniello was "unstained with personal crimes" while the poisoner was not: the Paris crowd, struck by her gracefulness at the stake, made her "a saint" by evening and bought the charred wood that burned her. Then England — hangmen's rope at a guinea a foot (Dodd, Fauntleroy, Thurtell), the Red Barn stripped of tiles and door-pieces after Corder murdered Maria Marten, her hair at two guineas and the buyer feeling lucky; police forced to guard Greenacre's Camberwell house; the dead criminal's hand rubbed on sufferers from the king's evil, worth ten guineas under Charles II; and Courtenay, the "mad knight of Malta," whose beard, autograph, bark-stripped tree and stroked horse drew sightseers a hundred and fifty miles, his grave needing a watch lest the bones be carried off.
The closing stretch cools into modern connoisseurship and fraud, with one foreign interlude for contrast: the Chinese custom reported from Davis, where an upright judge's boots are ceremonially drawn off to hang in the hall of justice, fresh pairs consecrated by five minutes' wear — relics of integrity rather than infamy, which is precisely Mackay's original criterion honoured. Against that he sets Europe's commerce in Shakespeare's mulberry tree, Napoleon's Waterloo table, Waterloo bullets and buttons, and St. Helena willow twigs, noting that counterfeits outnumber originals: alien wood passes for mulberry, the table and "a round dozen of counterfeits" are alike destroyed, bullets are cast fresh from ore a dozen years late, and willows are now propagated near London. His warning — "look well to their money before they part with it to the ciceroni that swarm in the village of Waterloo" — makes the deception commercial rather than theological, the old credulity now simply monetized.
The chapter ends by returning to its opening concession rather than overturning it: "in relics, as in every thing else, there is the use and the abuse." Undoubted relics of great men and great events "will always possess attractions for the thinking and refined," and the final word is Cowley's lines from the chair built of Drake's ship, wishing to travel just to see an old wheel of Phaeton's chariot — an avowedly "extravagant wish," but charming rather than deluded. Having moved from the lock of a dead child's hair through toenails, gallows-mould and fraudulent bullets, Mackay closes the circle on affection, leaving the madness located not in reverence itself but in reverence detached from desert and exploited for profit.
Key claims, with the lines that support them
The love of relics starts in honest affection, not in fraud or stupidity, and in that form deserves no mockery.
The author points to a lock of hair from a dead wife or child, and to a book an absent companion once annotated, as treasures whose worth anyone understands; he puts in the same innocent class objects tied to admired greatness, such as the Montaigne volume signed by Shakespeare, the chair Rubens used while painting the Descent from the Cross, Galileo's telescope in Florence, and the swords of Wallace or Hampden.
“The love for relics is one which will never be eradicated as long as feeling and affection are denizens of the heart.”
RelicsRead in context →
Relic-worship goes wrong at the point where admiration of the great forgets that goodness is part of greatness, so notoriety gets honoured like merit.
Having first granted the pure case, the author turns it over: the same impulse makes people prize a saint's jawbone, an apostle's toe-nail, the handkerchief a king used, or the rope that hanged a criminal, confusing the renowned with the merely notorious. His sharpest case is the poisoner Madame de Brinvilliers, burned in the Place de Grève, whose ashes and even the charred firewood were bought up as charms against witchcraft after the crowd was struck by her beauty — a single execution, so partly an accident of her appearance. England supplies the same pattern commercially: hangmen's ropes sold at about a guinea a foot, ten guineas in Charles II's time for an executed criminal's hand to rub on scrofula sufferers, and crowds stripping Corder's barn in 1828 or needing police to keep Greenacre's house intact in 1837.
“Men, in their admiration of the great, and of all that appertained to them, have forgotten that goodness is a component part of true greatness, and have made fools of themselves for the jawbone of a saint, the toe-nail of an apostle, the handkerchief a king blew his nose in, or the rope that hanged a criminal.”
RelicsRead in context →
Where credulous buyers gather, a profitable supply of forged relics appears to meet them.
Fragments of the true cross multiplied in eleventh- and twelfth-century churches until, collected together, they would nearly have built a cathedral — though the original was reportedly burned by the Huns. Enough St. Peter toe-nails existed in Europe by the Council of Clermont to fill a sack, and nails freshly cut from an ecclesiastic's foot fetched a diamond's price within six months. The same economy runs in the author's own century: Napoleon's Waterloo table was destroyed along with a dozen imitations, bullets are cast years after the battle for sale by the guides at Waterloo, and alien wood passes as Shakespeare's mulberry in snuff-boxes.
“Fragments, purporting to have been cut from it, were, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to be found in almost every church in Europe, and would, if collected together in one place, have been almost sufficient to have built a cathedral.”
RelicsRead in context →
3 more claims
A crowd can destroy a person and then sanctify his remains, with no change in the facts about him.
The Naples populace shot Masaniello like a mad dog, dragged his headless body through the mud and threw it in a ditch; next morning sentiment had turned, and he was buried in royal robes by torchlight with ten thousand armed men attending, his fisherman's clothes torn into keepsakes, his hut door cut up for images, and earth he had trodden on sold by weight in gold. Brinvilliers' overnight promotion to a saint shows the same swing where, unlike Masaniello, the crimes were real.
“Their pity soon increased to admiration, and, ere evening, she was considered a saint.”
RelicsRead in context →
The impulse is not peculiar to medieval Catholicism: it recurs in secular Europe and outside Christendom altogether.
Alongside the shrines, the author lists the most popular modern relics as Shakespeare's mulberry wood, twigs cut from the willow over Napoleon's grave on St. Helena (now grown into trees near London), and Waterloo bullets and coat buttons; in France Napoleon's wood is made into sweetmeat boxes. From Davis's account of China he adds that a retiring judge known for integrity has his boots pulled off at the city gate to be kept in the hall of justice, replacement pairs being removed after five minutes because merely drawing them on consecrates them.
“The love for relics is one which will never be eradicated as long as feeling and affection are denizens of the heart.”
RelicsRead in context →
The right verdict is not against relics but against their abuse.
The author states the distinction plainly — in relics as in everything else there is a use and an abuse — and closes by endorsing Cowley, who, sitting in a chair made from the timbers of Drake's ship, said he would still travel to see a wheel of Phaethon's chariot. Genuine mementos of real men and events keep their hold on thoughtful people; what he attacks is fame without goodness and provenance without proof.
“Fragments, purporting to have been cut from it, were, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to be found in almost every church in Europe, and would, if collected together in one place, have been almost sufficient to have built a cathedral.”
RelicsRead in context →
How it works
The 3 mechanisms the chapter’s argument runs on.
Mechanism 1
From affection to superstition
Keeping a token of someone loved or admired is a natural feeling, so the habit spreads easily. But once admiration attaches to anyone much talked about, the test of goodness drops out and only fame remains, so a bone, a toe-nail or a hangman's rope is venerated exactly as a hero's sword would be.
Mechanism 2
Belief in cures funds forgery
Because relics are believed to ward off evil and heal disease, buyers will pay almost anything and cannot check provenance. Sellers who live on that trade simply produce more: fresh toe-nails become apostle's nails, new lead becomes Waterloo bullets, ordinary wood becomes Shakespeare's mulberry.
Mechanism 3
Pity at the scaffold makes saints
A public execution puts the condemned on display as a victim rather than an offender; the crowd's disgust turns to pity at the severity of the punishment, and pity to admiration. Within hours the same people who demanded the death collect the ashes or the corpse as sacred objects.
Common misreadings
The chapter is telling you that keeping mementos of the dead or of great people is itself a delusion.
The author opens by defending exactly those keepsakes as the hallowed root of the practice, and ends still endorsing a genuine relic of Drake's ship; his charge falls on two specific abuses — honouring celebrity regardless of character, and paying relic prices for objects whose history cannot be checked.
“The love for relics is one which will never be eradicated as long as feeling and affection are denizens of the heart.”
RelicsRead in context →
Relic mania belongs to the age of pilgrimages and ended with the medieval church.
The author traces modern reliquism back to the centuries before the Crusades precisely to show it is still running: the examples that carry the argument are nineteenth-century and often secular — Corder's barn in 1828, Greenacre's house in 1837, Courtenay's hair and the stripped tree in 1838, recast Waterloo bullets, and fake Shakespeare mulberry boxes.
“Fragments, purporting to have been cut from it, were, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to be found in almost every church in Europe, and would, if collected together in one place, have been almost sufficient to have built a cathedral.”
RelicsRead in context →
Key concepts in Relics
- Reliquism
- The habit of venerating objects linked to a revered person or event.
- Where it applies: Legitimate when the relic is genuine and the person admired for goodness; abusive when fame alone sanctifies.
- Home-relics
- Keepsakes of loved ones, whose value needs no explanation.
- Where it applies: Private affection only; no claim of miraculous power.
- Confounding the famous and the infamous
- Treating notoriety as if it were greatness worth commemorating.
- Where it applies: Describes the crowd's criterion, not the relic's authenticity.
- Manufactured relics
- Forged mementos cast or carved to meet demand.
- Where it applies: Requires a priced market and unverifiable provenance.
0 more concepts
Reader’s notes on RelicsAI reading companion
“Thus the principle of reliquism is hallowed and enshrined by love.”
Read in context →The chapter's hinge, and its most generous move: he grants the impulse full legitimacy before dismantling its excesses. Harder to dismiss him afterward.
“the wood of the true cross, which, like the oil of the widow, never diminished”
Read in context →Scripture turned against itself — a miracle image repurposed as a fraud joke. Deftly done, and more devastating than any argument.
“Peter’s toes were uncommonly prolific”
Read in context →He wins by arithmetic, not theology. Count the relics and the faith collapses on its own — the cathedral built of cross fragments, the sackful of toenails.
6 more notes
“The majority of them had no other means of subsistence than the profits thus obtained.”
Read in context →Here's the real engine, stated flatly and then dropped. Not mass delusion but a labour market — pilgrimage as import trade. He's less interested in the economics than he should be.
“Their pity soon increased to admiration, and, ere evening, she was considered a saint.”
Read in context →A poisoner sainted by nightfall because she was graceful at the stake. The crowd doesn't venerate virtue, it venerates intensity — and beauty will do in a pinch.
“the patient afflicted with the king’s evil would be instantly cured”
Read in context →Note what's buried: scrofula was cured by the king's touch. So the hanged man's hand is the poor man's royal hand — stolen sovereignty, sold by the executioner.
“it being considered sufficient to consecrate them that he should have merely drawn them on”
Read in context →The sharpest item in the chapter, and he lets it pass without comment. A relic manufactured on demand, knowingly, as pure ceremony — the Chinese had industrialized what Europe pretended was accident.
“is the owner of a dump, first extracted from the ore a dozen years afterwards”
Read in context →He slides from debunking faith to warning tourists about their wallets — the credulity is identical, only the shrine has changed from altar to souvenir stall.
“The undoubted relics of great men, or great events, will always possess attractions for the thinking and refined.”
Read in context →The escape hatch. Having shown that authentication is exactly what never happens, he rescues his own taste by calling his relics "undoubted" — the Shakespeare signature is verified, the saint's thighbone absurd. By whose audit?
A reader’s takeAI reading companion
The structure gives away what the method conceals: class judgment
A chapter that is cleverer about crowds than about itself. Mackay's method here is almost entirely arithmetical — he never argues that the true cross is false, he just notes there is enough of it to build a cathedral; never that the toenails aren't Peter's, only that they'd fill a sack. That's genuinely effective, and it lets him stay inside a Protestant-rationalist register without seeming to attack belief as such. But the structure gives him away. He opens with the lock of a dead child's hair and closes with Cowley's chair, bracketing the superstition with a reliquism he endorses: Shakespeare's Florio, Galileo's telescope, Tell's arrow — some of which are no better attested than Charlemagne's femur.
The dividing line turns out to be not evidence but class and taste. What he does see, with real precision, is the irrelevance of merit to veneration: Masaniello and Brinvilliers, Thurtell's rope and Maria Marten's hair, get the same treatment as the apostles. Fame is the only sacrament; the crowd sacralizes whatever has been intensely talked about. And the economics flicker through without being pursued — pilgrims who live off the trade, Newgate hangmen with a side income, Waterloo ciceroni casting fresh bullets for the credulous. Each time, the "delusion" is somebody's reliable business. The counterfeit relic market is the thread that would have made this a theory rather than a catalogue, and he keeps stepping over it to get to the next anecdote.
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The Chinese magistrate's boots are the chapter's unclaimed prize: a relic everyone knows is manufactured on the spot, and which works anyway, because its function was never evidentiary. Mackay reports it as a curiosity. It is actually the answer.
Read Relics with these cards beside each passage.
Open in FeedLitraWhere the argument strains
Not a rebuttal — the places a careful reader will want to push.
- Law is exonerated as a sound theorist, yet the book's own account of credit's fragility under arbitrary power implies the scheme could never have been safe in that state.
“He understood the monetary question better than any man of his day; and if his system fell with a crash so tremendous, it was not so much his fault as that of the people amongst whom he had erected it.”
Money Mania.—The Mississippi SchemeRead in context → - If the public's avarice is the true cause, it is unclear why regents, parliaments and directors are still treated as the decisive agents of ruin.
“He understood the monetary question better than any man of his day; and if his system fell with a crash so tremendous, it was not so much his fault as that of the people amongst whom he had erected it.”
Money Mania.—The Mississippi SchemeRead in context → - Exposure both spreads and cures: publicity is said to breed imitation, while publicising the trifling physical cause is the prescribed remedy.
“It seems applicable to every circumstance, and is the universal answer to every question;”
Popular Follies of Great CitiesRead in context → - Coercion is said both to inflame belief and to compel conformity — fiscal and despotic pressure succeeding where sermons fail — leaving no rule for which outcome to expect.
“The greater the dangers of the way, the fairer chance that sins of deep dye would be atoned for.”
The CrusadesRead in context →
4 more tensions and 8 limits of the evidence
- Leaders are denied creative power over manias, yet the Crusades' peak is credited to Peter the Hermit and to Urban's reinterpretation of the crowd's shout.
“Every one of these causes influenced the Crusades, and conspired to render them the most extraordinary instance upon record of the extent to which popular enthusiasm can be carried.”
The CrusadesRead in context → - Imagination and the sound nursing practised alongside the ritual compete for the same cures, so the imagination account is never isolated from its rival.
“Evremond thus sums up the effect he produced on the popular mind: “So great was the confidence in him, that the blind fancied they saw the light which they did not see—the deaf imagined that they heard—the lame that they walked straight, and the paralytic that they had recovered the use of their limbs.”
The MagnetisersRead in context → - Knowing that many subscribers disbelieved the schemes undercuts the portrait of mania as sincere epidemic credulity.
“it was enough for their purpose that their shares would, by stock-jobbing arts, be soon raised to a premium, when they got rid of them with all expedition to the really credulous.”
The South-Sea BubbleRead in context → - Remedies conflict: restoring credit spares the guilty while retroactive penalties satisfy justice without recovering value, and official courts of honour are proposed though the same chapters show edicts and tribunals ignored or abused.
“It is not anywhere stated that Henry interfered to prevent it, notwithstanding his solemn oath; but that, on the contrary, he encouraged it, and appointed the Marshal de la Marque to see that it was conducted according to the rules of chivalry.”
Duels and OrdealsRead in context →
Limits of the evidence
- Key figures are reported without sourcing, borrowed from earlier compilers, or deferred to a later place in the book, and never independently verified.
“The national debt amounted to 3000 millions of livres, the revenue to 145 millions, and the expenses of government to 142 millions per annum; leaving only three millions to pay the interest upon 3000 millions.”
Money Mania.—The Mississippi SchemeRead in context → - Evidence is overwhelmingly anecdote and single striking cases — ink-marked eggs, a decoded verse, one haunted house, one thief — which illustrate rather than measure how widespread the behaviour was.
“it was enough for their purpose that their shares would, by stock-jobbing arts, be soon raised to a premium, when they got rid of them with all expedition to the really credulous.”
The South-Sea BubbleRead in context → - Central claims rest on imputed motives read backwards from outcomes — what Law could have foreseen, what the clergy intended — the same retrospective fitting the book condemns in prophecy.
“He understood the monetary question better than any man of his day; and if his system fell with a crash so tremendous, it was not so much his fault as that of the people amongst whom he had erected it.”
Money Mania.—The Mississippi SchemeRead in context → - Coverage is confined to a few European centuries, chiefly English, French, German, Italian and Russian material, so claims about universal human credulity outrun the sample.
“It should be observed that the rules for the interpretation of dreams are far from being universal.”
Fortune-TellingRead in context → - Several key narratives rest on contested or partisan sources, with Weldon contradicting the poison story, Eglisham called rancorous, Clarendon blaming natural illness, and popular admiration documented through one traveller's impressions.
“A slight sketch of it will be a fitting introduction to the history of the poisoning mania, which was so prevalent in France and Italy fifty years later.”
The Slow PoisonersRead in context → - The imagination explanation is inferred from the inadequacy of rival accounts rather than tested, so it cannot specify which patients or ailments it covers.
“Evremond thus sums up the effect he produced on the popular mind: “So great was the confidence in him, that the blind fancied they saw the light which they did not see—the deaf imagined that they heard—the lame that they walked straight, and the paralytic that they had recovered the use of their limbs.”
The MagnetisersRead in context → - The debunkings turn on silence under observation and on latches found after years of terror, which suggest human agency and shallow recovery rather than proving either.
“it was summoned to knock, but it knocked not; it was summoned to scratch, but it scratched not;”
Haunted HousesRead in context → - Counter-cases are left unexplained — an instantly obeyed moustache ban, a reform lasting scarcely a year — and the boundary between harmless and murderous imitation is asserted rather than argued.
“But among all the instances of the interference of governments with men’s hair, the most extraordinary, not only for its daring, but for its success, is that of Peter the Great, in 1705.”
Influence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and BeardRead in context →
Mind map of the whole book
5 clusters of ideas: a plain-English label, a one-line explanation, and the term the text itself uses.
1 · How Money Bubbles Get Blown Up
- Prices propped up only by hope of selling higher
- A price or worth sustained by expectation of resale and manufactured rumour rather than by use, earnings, or intrinsic quality.In the text: Fictitious value
- Traders bet on resale, not belief in the venture
- Jobbing on fluctuations rather than possession; subscribers need not believe the scheme, only find a buyer.In the text: The greater-fool trade
- Paper notes are safe only while they can be cashed
- Notes circulating in place of metal; sound while redeemable at sight, fatal once claims grow far past available coin.In the text: Paper credit outrunning coin
- After the crash, blame a few men and move on
- The habit of blaming a few directors or one projector for a ruin the whole public helped create, while courts, retroactive penalties and self-regulation can no longer restore value once confidence fails.In the text: Scapegoating and law's impotence after collapse
2 · Promises That Dodge Every Test
- Keep the secret vague and no one can prove you wrong
- Devices that keep a claim permanently unfalsifiable — the secret never shown, the prophecy undated or vague, failure reread as allegory, and fulfilment supplied after the event by readers who add the names and dates the prediction never gave.In the text: Escape from any decisive test
- Belief alone can relieve or create real symptoms
- Belief and desire alone can produce or relieve symptoms, so a confident healer and useless remedies appear to cure.In the text: Power of imagination over the body
- An invisible fluid invented to explain the cures
- The occult transferable agent — healing magnet, Mesmer's fluid, animal magnetism — postulated where imagination already suffices.In the text: Imagined universal fluid
- Watch closely and the marvel shrinks to a small cause
- Looking for the trifling material cause, or watching under controlled conditions, dissolves the marvel; reviewing predecessors' follies is humbling and useful, and even vain pursuits leave real knowledge behind.In the text: Patient investigation and the study of past error
3 · When Faith Turns Deadly
- Holy texts recruited afterwards to bless what people want
- Doctrine, misread scripture or a leader's reinterpretation consecrate a belief that already existed — the crowd's spontaneous shout becomes God's voice, the monks' devil corroborates the witch.In the text: Sanction supplied after the fact
- Torture and ordeal produce the proof the court lacks
- Where evidence is absent, forms supply it: identical questions plus the rack yield identical confessions read as corroboration, ordeal or combat outcomes count as God's verdict though arrangers can rig them, and the charge itself is easy to make and impossible to refute.In the text: Procedure that manufactures its own proof
- Kings, parliaments and churches enlarge the frenzy
- Arbitrary, legislative or ecclesiastical power magnifies a mania instead of checking it — royal over-issue, coercive edicts, parliamentary sanction, papal inquisitors, statutes making an offence punishable without proof of harm.In the text: Authority as amplifier of folly
- Each century catches its own fashionable madness
- Credulity behaves like contagious disease: each era plunges into one characteristic madness, panic spikes amid calamity when suffering lowers the threshold of proof, and everyone feels personally menaced by invisible enemies.In the text: Delusion as epidemic of its age
4 · When a Vice Becomes Fashionable
- Soft or privileged justice lets a crime spread
- Church privilege, special courts, routine pardons and solemn bans with standing exemptions shelter wrongdoers and signal that the law is a formality.In the text: Unequal or unenforced justice
- Once everyone does it, it stops feeling wrong
- When an offence becomes customary, honourable or socially required, participants stop feeling it as wrong and may seek occasions for it to avoid shame — as gambling gains and illusory prosperity loosen manners into luxury and insolence.In the text: Fashion that dissolves moral weight
- Props, rumours and theatre make the danger feel real
- Baquet, dim light, music and touch, anointed weapons, costumes, invented stories and engineered noises produce the very effect then counted as evidence or as grounds for a crowd's sympathy.In the text: Staged ritual and manufactured rumour
- Sellers of fear and fortune cash in on the panic
- Rogues, traders, forgers and oracle-book sellers convert public fear or curiosity into fees, property and merchandise, so credulous demand reliably manufactures its own supply.In the text: Commerce in credulity
5 · Why Follies Never Really Die
- Restlessness about death and the future drives it all
- Dissatisfaction with death, toil and ignorance of the future both drives progress and spawns absurd remedies, including vanity recast as method in pretended sciences like judicial astrology.In the text: Discontent and the presumption of foreknowledge
- Praise goes to the daring and famous, not the good
- Esteem that tracks daring, show and notoriety instead of merit — the adept cultivating a flattering legend, the courteous robber excused his cruelty, the infamous commemorated like the great.In the text: Admiration detached from goodness
- Love of a keepsake slides into worship of trash
- Veneration of objects linked to a revered person or event, degenerating from innocent keepsakes whose value needs no superstition to explain it.In the text: Reliquism rooted in pure affection
- People copy whatever the crowd is admiring
- The crowd's reflex of copying whatever is widely admired or publicised — subscriptions, cures, phrases, crimes, crusading — so belief and action spread because neighbours act, not because evidence warrants it, and doubters fall silent or are shamed into joining.In the text: Popular imitativeness
Annotated passagesAI reading companion
Lines worth stopping on, each with a note on why it matters to the whole book.
“fashion, which at times it is possible to move with a wisp, stands firm against a lever”
Read in context →The book's deepest law stated in one line: collective habit is immovable by proportionate force yet tips over for nothing at all, which is why every chapter's delusion ends by evaporating rather than being refuted.
“not so much his fault as that of the people amongst whom he had erected it”
Read in context →The structural keystone of the whole project — the projector must be excused so the crowd can carry the blame, a move Mackay silently repeats for Blunt, Mesmer and Peter the Hermit alike.
“the Bible established the existence of the power of divination by its edicts against those who pretended to it”
Read in context →Prohibition read as certification is the engine behind half the book: statute against witches, parliament's sanction of South-Sea, edicts against tulip defaults — official notice keeps converting into official proof.
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“A grove of a hundred oaks would not have furnished all the wood sold in little morsels as remnants of the true cross”
Read in context →Arithmetic as the book's sharpest instrument, the method that recurs from relic-counting to burn-rates to tulip prices: Mackay rarely out-argues a delusion, he just adds it up.
“it has neither the beauty nor the perfume of the rose”
Read in context →The buried premise of all four money chapters — that price ought to track intrinsic virtue — which is exactly the assumption bubbles disprove and Mackay never examines.
“a pill made of bread, if taken with sufficient faith, will operate a cure better than all the drugs in the pharmacopœia”
Read in context →Belief itself as the only active agent is the thesis that unifies magnetism, alchymy, haunted houses and prophecy; handing it over on page one shows Mackay collecting specimens rather than investigating.
“six hundred annually, or two every day, if we leave out the Sundays”
Read in context →The deadpan ledger of two burnings a day, Sundays excluded, is the book's moral peak — proof that the machinery of authority, not popular panic, is what makes a delusion lethal.
“not visitations of Providence, but the works of some neighbouring hag”
Read in context →Blame needing a body, and landing on the least defended one, is the cruelty shared by witch trials, poisoning prosecutions and every post-bubble reckoning that hanged clerks and pardoned ministers.
“Dissatisfaction with his lot seems to be the characteristic of man in all ages and climates. So far, however, from being an evil”
Read in context →Licensing the impulse before mocking the folly is Mackay's standing rhetorical contract with the reader, repeated verbatim in the relic chapter and the reason the satire never curdles into contempt.
“every wall for miles around was chalked with it”
Read in context →Chalk on every wall names what the book otherwise lacks a word for: a delusion scales only as fast as its cheapest replication medium, whether chalk, ballad, pamphlet or stage.
“The latch of the door was broken, so that it could not be fastened, and it swung chiefly upon the bottom hinge”
Read in context →A broken latch ending five years of terror is the book's method compressed — test the marvel under control and it dissolves, which is why Mackay's cures are always glaziers, judges and evidence, never counter-arguments.
“the privilege of supplying the colonies with negroes for thirty years”
Read in context →The thirty-year slave-trade concession passed over in a clause marks the limit of the book's moral vision: a vast moralist on money who cannot see the one real asset underneath the fantasy.
A reader’s verdictAI reading companion
Delusions weren't catastrophic until authority's laws and courts underwrote them
Read end to end, Mackay's Memoirs is not really a book about crowds; it is a book that keeps discovering, against its own stated thesis, that crowds are rarely the authors of their own madness. The announced subject is popular delusion — the people as water, the projector as mere boatman — and the organising arc moves from money (Mississippi, South-Sea, tulips) through pseudo-knowledge (alchymy, prophecy, fortune-telling, magnetism) to blood and institutions (crusades, witch-burning, poisoning, duelling) before settling into the harmless residue (haunted houses, street slang, thief-worship, relics).
But the evidence Mackay so honestly piles up tells a sharper story than his moralising frame: in nearly every chapter the delusion only becomes catastrophic once authority underwrites it. Law's bank was sound while its notes were redeemable and ruinous once the state made it an engine of edict; the South-Sea fantasy needed an act of parliament before it could become a gambling mania; witchcraft needed a statute, a court exempted from ordinary rules of proof, and torture to manufacture the confessions that proved the crime; duelling needed kings who condemned it in reason and pardoned it in sympathy; the crusades needed, after popular zeal had burnt out, royal and clerical fanaticism to drag them to Acre.
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The cures follow the same logic and are the book's most useful finding: witch panic ended not when demonology was refuted but when judges demanded real evidence and rulers abolished torture; magnetism ended not through argument but through controlled proof — wooden tractors curing what metal cured, a bare command inducing sleep. Refutation spreads a craze; procedure kills it. The second thread, running under the first, is that delusion is sustained by machinery rather than belief: alchymy survived on secrecy, deferred proof, staged apparatus and high-ranking converts who became the fraud's loudest guarantors; prophecy survived by being composed after the fact or left undated and therefore unfalsifiable; relic-worship survived on a trade in forgeries that Mackay dismantles by arithmetic rather than theology.
And the third thread — the one Mackay is least comfortable with — is that reckoning always falls unevenly. Directors and obscure suppliers hang; ministers, cardinals and royal favourites are shielded; the burned witches are the poor, aged and defenceless. The sharpest judgments in the book are the ones he almost stumbles into: that publicity teaches a crime while impunity makes it pay; that coercion fails where vanity and fashion succeed (centuries of papal decrees lost to a beard tax and a courtier's nightmare); that the blame for duelling rests on society rather than the duellist, so the remedy must be social too; that the progress of civilisation shows only in milder punishment of deceivers, not in reduced gullibility, which leaves the fault with lawgivers who punish the people instead of educating them.
He is also, to his credit, not a pure debunker: alchymy's failed hunt produced real chemistry, mesmerism produced a vast unintended experiment on imagination, and the crusades — absurdly unprofitable at two million lives for a century of precarious tenure — still cracked European superstition open and prepared ground for the Reformation. What I'd say to a reader: enjoy the anecdotes, they have outlived every price in the record, but read against the grain. Mackay's repeated verdict is that the public went mad; his documents mostly show that the public was invited, legitimised, taxed and then blamed.
Use the chapters as a diagnostic kit rather than a gallery of fools — ask who issued the paper, who wrote the statute, who declined the test, who was pardoned and who was burned — and notice that the appetite the book describes never actually disappears. It only shrinks, moves indoors, and waits for authority to lend it credit again.
How Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds has been read
6 readers, and what each did with the book.
- 1930s · Commentary
Bernard Baruch
Foreword urged investors to heed lessons of crowd mania
Foreword, 1932 edition - 1970s · Commentary
Charles Kindleberger
Drew on Mackay's manias while theorizing crisis cycles
Manias, Panics, and Crashes - 1980s · Commentary
Peter Garber
Argued the tulip bubble tale lacks real price evidence
Famous First Bubbles - 1990s · Rewriting
Mike Dash
Retold the tulip craze with archival and botanical detail
Tulipomania - 2000s · Commentary
Robert Shiller
Used Mackay's crowd folly to frame market exuberance
Irrational Exuberance
1 more reader
- 2000s · Commentary
Anne Goldgar
Dutch archives contradict the inherited tulip mania legend
Tulipmania
What reviewers say
Readers treat Mackay's 1841 survey as a classic worth rereading: reviewers praise his storytelling and the perspective his catalogue of mass hysteria offers, especially the chapters on tulipmania and the South Sea Bubble, and one reviewer calls it foundational to crowd psychology. Dissenters find the presentation tedious and repetitive, the alchemy sections overlong, and expected psychological analysis replaced by anecdote.
A synthesis of published reviews. Ratings are not shown; follow the links for each review in full.
Sources and license
Public domainThe text
- Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay (London: Office of the National Illustrated Library, 1852; first published 1841). Public domain. Text: Project Gutenberg eBook #24518, produced by Jonathan Ingram, Bill Tozier, Barbara Tozier and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. Read it free
- Summaries, claims, notes and essays are AI-assisted: generated by FeedLitra from the full text, with quotations checked against the source. Last updated October 22, 2026.
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is in the public domain. Read it with these cards beside the text.
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