Thirty years ago, Wolfgang Pauli, the great Nobel quantum physicist and professor at the very university sponsoring this conference on occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance, published a famous essay entitled “The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler.” It appeared in a volume entitled The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche in which Carl Gustav Jung, also a member of this university for many years, wrote a companion essay entitled “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.” Pauli's essay is often cited with great admiration by historians who write about Kepler or Fludd and by writers in the Jungian literature conscious of the respectability bestowed upon their work by the association of Jung with a renowned “hard scientist.” Pauli's historical study is, in all respects, a thoroughly professional historical analysis with scrupulous citation of texts, superior translations checked by the art historian Erwin Panofsky, and succinct interpretations. What is never mentioned by anyone in the history of science literature is the fact that the book appeared under the auspices of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, and that the real subject of Pauli's article was not primarily Kepler as a historical figure but rather Kepler as an illustration of the problematic relationship between the observer and what is observed; or, in the language of Jung's analytic psychology, the relation between archetypal images and sense perception.

Until now, no one has asked publicly why Pauli wrote such an essay, why he encoded his analysis in Jungian terms, and what his relationship to Jung might have been. Nor, surprisingly, has anyone questioned the historical account for evidential accuracy or the terms of the analysis itself.

Thus spake Gerrard Winstanley in 1649. How novel was this kind of dual appeal to reason and revelation? This chapter explores the usages of the word “reason” (and its cognates) by Winstanley's contemporaries. It follows the prescriptions sketched by J. G. A. Pocock in attempting to “write the history of debates conducted in a culture where paradigms and other speech structures overlapped and interacted; where there could be debate, because there was communication, between different ‘languages’ and language-using groups and individuals.”

It is a commonplace that the religious and political controversies of mid-seventeenth-century England were concerned with the “right reading” of God's will. The all-important issue for the opponents of orthodoxy in the ideological war was to establish that their own interpretations of the divine will were right, being based on an unchallengeable source; to undermine the rationale for existing institutions they claimed for themselves indubitable insights – insights derived from private illumination of the spirit. While this battle of ideas raged in the political and religious arenas, a parallel struggle occurred over rival interpretations of God's determinations in the natural order. The reemergence of the writings of Hermes Trismegistus meant that in the realm of nature, too, knowledge must be based on an illuminist epistemology.

Detailed records of early criminal trials are scarce, and one of the most extensive collections to survive for the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that of the ancient duchy of Lorraine, now housed in the Archives Départementales of the Meurthe-et-Moselle at Nancy. Among these documents are well over two hundred complete dossiers for those tried on charges of witchcraft, nearly all of them for the half-century from 1580 to 1630. Although this probably represents only something between 5 and 10 percent of Lorraine's witchcraft prosecutions (for the names of many hundreds of others convicted can be recovered from less complete records), ii constitutes an admirable working sample; the present analysis is based on close examination of some seventy trials and a general impression of the remainder. This material is of a kind not normally found in England or France, and only sporadically elsewhere in Europe. It includes full witness depositions, commonly from fifteen to twenty-five witnesses; the interrogation of the accused on the basis of these testimonies; the confrontation of the witnesses and the accused; and normally one or more sessions of interrogation under torture. The nature of the records is very important because they give us an unadulterated view of the first stage of accusations, without any serious likelihood of editing by the lawyers and judges. It is the earlier stages of the trials, rather than the confessions under torture, which enable one to build up a picture of the popular attitudes that had prompted the accusations.