"the European witch panic took on a logic and inertia of its own. After all, it was good business"

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/very-superstitious.php?page=all

Very Superstitious

"Such subtleties were no doubt lost as the crush and waste of humanity that was the European witch panic took on a logic and inertia of its own. After all, it was good business. Agnes Sampson’s torture and execution, like most witch trials, wasn’t cheap, employing judges, scribes, bailiffs, jailers, and executioners—each of whom had a financial stake in further trials. The trial record of Suzanne Gaudry, executed in 1652 in Ronchain, France, notes that each member of the court was to be paid 4 livres, 16 sous, while the soldier who accompanied her to Roux for the trial was to be paid 30 livres. Around 1593 in Trier, the scholar Cornelius Loos quipped that witch persecutions were a new kind of alchemy, whereby “gold and silver [were] coined from human blood”—before all his books were burned and he was forced to publicly recant ever having said such a thing.

....................

Perhaps this explains why a belief in sympathetic magic—irrational, superstitious, glorious—continues unabated in our hyperrationalist age. If anything, the ascendancy of science has clarified these beliefs, and the degree to which we’re willing to cling to them despite a cognitive awareness of the fallacious nature of magic. In the past few decades, celebrity and sports memorabilia have become big business; at auction sites like gottahaverockandroll.com, one can bid on all manner of ordinary items that have been imbued with the proximity of the famous: the site boasts of having auctioned John Lennon’s talisman necklace, worn on the cover of his and Yoko’s Two Virgins album, for a record $528,000, and recently auctioned a small amount of hair collected from Michael Jackson’s stay at the Carlyle Hotel, bought by a gambling website with an eye toward turning it into a roulette ball. “Together,” onlinegamblingpal.com proclaims, “we can ensure Michael Jackson continues to rock and ‘roll’ forever,” while meanwhile, the Hard Rock Cafe continues to build on its successful business model of serving mediocre food magically enhanced by its close proximity to the guitars of the famous suspended above diners’ heads. Sympathetic magic was once employed to protect us from chaos, to offer a measure of control over the caprices of nature. Now it offers a chance of escape, however fleeting, from a world of hierarchy and order."