It is Reformation Day, and a particularly special one at that. 500 years ago today—as goes the legend—Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral. In Luther’s day, Halloween was All Saint’s Eve—part of Allhallowsmas or Hallowstide, a three-day, ritual-packed observance of Christianity’s early martyrs and first saints dating to the eighth century. The unconverted Romans looked at the first saints and saw a small clique of radical, fanatical, cannibalistic zombie/death-cultists, but by Luther’s time Christians were no longer hiding out in catacombs. They ran some of the world’s most powerful institutions. With power came the ability to transform folk beliefs and theology into political weapons, tools for statecrafting.

Further Reading

Godwin’s Lives of the Necromancers [insert PDF link when made available]

Marshall, Peter. William Godwin: Philosopher, Novelist, Revolutionary. PM Press. 2017.

Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Boston: Beacon Press. 1954

Trevor-Roper, H. R. The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1969.

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