or why, and rushed on
their own destruction. Often manias are logical deductions from notions
(especially religious notions) which have been suggested, as in the case
of the flagellants. It is the ills of life which drive people to such
deductions, and they bear witness to excessive nervous excitement. The
mediaeval dancing mania was more purely nervous. The demonism and
demonology of the Middle Ages was a fertile source for such deductions,
which went far to produce the witchcraft mania. The demonistic notions
taught by the church furnished popular deductions, which the church took
up and reduced to dogmatic form, and returned as such to the masses.
Thus the notions of sorcery, heresy, and witchcraft were developed.

+215. Monstrous mass phenomena of mediaeval society.+ There must have
been a deep and strong anthropological reason for the development of
monstrous social phenomena in mediaeval society. The Latin world was
disintegrated to its first elements between the sixth century and the
tenth. Such a dissolution of society abolished the inherited mores with
all their restraints and inhibitions, and left society to the control of
fierce barbaric, that is physical, forces. At the same period the Latin
world absorbed hordes of barbarians who were still on a low nomadic
warrior stage of civilization, and who adopted the ruins of Roman
culture without assimilating them. The Christian church contributed
crass superstitions about the other world and the relations of this
world to it. The product was the Merovingian and Carlovingian history.
Passion, sensuality, ferocity, superstitious ignorance, and fear
characterized the age. It is supposed that western Europe was
overpopulated and that the crusades operated a beneficial reduction of
numbers.[441] These facts may account for the gigantic mass phenomena in
the early Middle Ages. Every sentiment was extravagant. Men were under
some mighty gregarious instinct which drove them to act in masses, and
they passed from one great passion or enthusiastic impulse to another at
very short intervals. The passions of hatred and revenge were
manifested, upon occasion, to the extremity of fiendishness. Nothing
which the mind could conceive of seemed to be renounced as excessive
(Clement V, John XXII). Gregory IX pursued the heretics and the emperor
with an absorption of his whole being and a rancor which we cannot
understand. Poverty was elevated into a noble virtue and a transcendent
m