In August 1634 a French priest, Urbain Grandier, was burnt at the stake at Loudun, France. He had been convicted of sorcery, and of being responsible for the possession by devils of a whole convent of nuns, who fell regularly into paroxysms of obscene and heretical frenzies. In 1952 Aldous Huxley published his account of these events, in “The Devils of Loudun”. The book was remarkable not so much for its careful historical research as for its close analysis of the motivation and mental state of the inquisitors and exorcists who brought about Grandier’s downfall.
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The book, and subsequent plays and films based on it, have enjoyed a steady if unspectacular fame since its publication. But it has been eclipsed by the other major work to explore the psychology and the social implications of witchcraft trials, Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”. As a rough index of popularity, the 10,000 odd hits on Google of The Devils is dwarfed by the half million or so of Miller’s work. Yet when the two works are compared, Huxley’s appears to have dated better than Miller’s work, and to have depths and insights which Miller’s lacks.
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Miller’s play opened a year after the publication of Huxley’s book, and the similarities between the events underlying them suggest that Miller may have borrowed his main theme from Huxley. If this was the case, he appears never to have acknowledged it. But Miller’s play had a polemical purpose absent from Huxley’s book: he was concerned to attack the anti-communist campaign of Senator Joe McCarthy and his UnAmerican Activities Committee by likening the proceedings to the witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. In doing so, he appears to have overlooked the fact that the hysteria, mutual denunciations and communal paranoia portrayed in The Crucible were in fact much closer in their atmosphere to Stalin’s show trials of the 1930’s than they were to the relatively mild and short-lived McCarthy-ite purges. If for no other reason, this intellectual narrowness on Miller’s part would be sufficient to make his work the lesser of the two.
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Huxley, by contrast, examined the background to the Loudun affair with a universal eye that encompassed explicitly all the major persecutions of his time, and which by extension can be applied to our own era. His comments on this are so astute that they are worth summarising in his own words:
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“In medieval and early modern Christendom the situation of sorcerers and their clients was almost precisely analogous to that of Jews under Hitler, capitalists under Stalin, Communists and fellow travellers in the United States. They were regarded as the agents of a Foreign Power, unpatriotic at the best, and at the worst, traitors, heretics, enemies of the people. Death was the penalty meted out to these metaphysical Quislings of the past and, in most parts of the contemporary world, death is the penalty which awaits the political and secular devil-worshippers known here as Reds, there as Reactionaries. ...
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Such behaviour-patterns antedate and outlive the beliefs which, at any given moment, seem to motivate them. Few people now believe in the devil; but very many enjoy behaving as their ancestors behaved when the Fiend was a reality as unquestionable as his Opposite Number. In order to justify their behaviour, they turn their theories into dogmas, their by-laws into First Principles, their political bosses into Gods and all those who disagree with them into incarnate devils.
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This ... makes it possible for them to indulge their ugliest passions with a clear conscience and in the certainty that they are working for the Highest Good. And when the current beliefs come, in their turn, to look silly, a new set will be invented, so that the immemorial madness may continue to wear its customary mask of legality, idealism, and true religion.”
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Unfortunately, the people who would benefit most from reading these wise observations - in our own time this would include the Bush administration, members of Al Qa’ida and certain fanatical Afro-Caribbean preachers in the UK who still believe in witchcraft - are the least likely to be influenced by them.  The only safe prediction is that the modern equivalents of witch finders, demon hunters and exorcists, will continue to operate for as long as human society remains a prey to religiously and politically manipulated hatred.